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Some function calls I've seen, like in Shoes, look like so:

para "Paragraph Text", :style => "this", :whatever => "that"

How do I define a function call so that can take one "normal" parameter
and then an unknown number of key/value pairs?
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On Saturday, August 14, 2010 01:23:21 pm Terry Michaels wrote:
> Some function calls I've seen, like in Shoes, look like so:
>
> para "Paragraph Text", :style => "this", :whatever => "that"
>
> How do I define a function call so that can take one "normal" parameter
> and then an unknown number of key/value pairs?

You could answer your own question by looking at the source of the program
doing this -- and I'd suggest it for anything you want to learn more about.

For this case, remember that this basically becomes:

para("Paragraph Text", {:style => "this", :whatever => "that"})

And of course, there's no reason those literals need to be there -- you could
just do this:

text = "Paragraph Text"
hash = {:style => "this", :whatever => "that"}
para(text, hash)

So, it should be clear that this is what you want:

def para text, options

There is one catch, though -- you said "unknown number", which could be zero,
so you need a default value:

def para text, options={}

On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 13:58, David Masover <> wrote:
> So, it should be clear that this is what you want:
>
> def para text, options
>
> There is one catch, though -- you said "unknown number", which could be zero,
> so you need a default value:
>
> def para text, options={}

Just a note: while you can omit parens in method definitions, most
code does only if the method takes no arguments, if it does, leave the
parens there.

On Saturday, August 14, 2010 05:50:22 pm Pablo Torres N. wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 13:58, David Masover <> wrote:
> > So, it should be clear that this is what you want:
> >
> > def para text, options
> >
> > There is one catch, though -- you said "unknown number", which could be
> > zero, so you need a default value:
> >
> > def para text, options={}
>
> Just a note: while you can omit parens in method definitions, most
> code does only if the method takes no arguments, if it does, leave the
> parens there.

Why?

I find it more readable without parens, but with syntax highlighting, mostly
because that's how I call methods.

On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 00:56, David Masover <> wrote:
> On Saturday, August 14, 2010 05:50:22 pm Pablo Torres N. wrote:
>> Just a note: while you can omit parens in method definitions, most
>> code does only if the method takes no arguments, if it does, leave the
>> parens there.
>
> Why?
>
> I find it more readable without parens, but with syntax highlighting, mostly
> because that's how I call methods.
>
>

Just a convention, I guess precisely so you can easily tell method
definitions and method invocations apart. Consider:

def say_hi(tittle, name)
puts "Hi, #{tittle} #{name}"
end

tittle = "Dr."
name = "Cham"

some_obj.instance_eval do
def say_hi tittle, name
puts "Howdy, #{tittle} #{name}"
end
end

A bit ambiguous.

> def para text, options
>
> There is one catch, though -- you said "unknown number", which could be
> zero,
> so you need a default value:
>
> def para text, options={}

There is also the "named parameter" gem which might be useful to you:
http://github.com/rdp/arguments
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