R.I.P. Ruby Hash Rocket Syntax 1993-2010

Re:R.I.P. Ruby Hash Rocket Syntax 1993-2010 by wfarr on Thursday January 06, 2011 @12:08AM (#2074116)

Who would put a space inside the key name for an item in a hash?

I'm confident it's commonly understood best practice (among many languages at that) to use an underscore (_) in lieu of spaces in such things.

I agree that the quirks themselves are odd, but the matter of using a key with a space in it really stood out.

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Re:R.I.P. Ruby Hash Rocket Syntax 1993-2010 by korny on Thursday January 06, 2011 @01:05AM (#2074268)

When your key is a phrase, for instance? A hash of { phrase => count } is a pretty common data structure.

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Re:R.I.P. Ruby Hash Rocket Syntax 1993-2010 by ark on Thursday January 06, 2011 @12:26AM (#2074154)

It's really common, actually. A symbol can actually have spaces in it:

:"Some Text" is a perfectly valid symbol.

ruby-1.9.2-p136 :001 > h = {:"Some Text" => 123} => {:"Some Text"=>123} ruby-1.9.2-p136 :002 > h[ "Some Text".to_sym ] => 123

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Re:R.I.P. Ruby Hash Rocket Syntax 1993-2010 by regularfry on Thursday January 06, 2011 @04:14AM (#2074691)

You can do it, but is it a good idea? What it implies to me is that at some point in your program, you're constructing symbols from arbitrary strings which aren't known ahead of time. This sounds like a recipe for disaster given that symbols aren't garbage collected.

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