From: Ron M <rm_rails@...>
Date: 2005-10-17T18:18:21+09:00
Subject: Convenient way to get many hash elements at once.

If I have a hash table with a bunch of fields; and I want to
extract a subset of them, kinda like "@a_hashtable{'a','c'}"
in perl, is there a nice way of doing so?
I was hoping something like this would work...

  h={'first name'=>'John', 'last name'=>'Doe', 'birthday'=>'1970-01-01', 'height'=>'5 foot'}

  h['first name','last name']  # hoping for ['John','Doe'] as a result.

but it gave me

   ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (2 for 1)
         from (irb):126:in `[]'
         from (irb):126
         from ^C:0

I suppose
  ['first name','last name'].map{|x| h[x]}
does what I want; but it surely isn't as readable as
  h['first name','last name']

If there's no cleaner way of doing this; would it be a reasonably
Ruby 2.0 request to allow Hash#[] to take multiple arguments and
return multiple return values for each of the arguments?