From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2007-02-22T01:06:02+09:00
Subject: Re: creating a hash key with a variable name?

On Feb 21, 2007, at 9:55 AM, terry wrote:

> Is it possible that I could do the following, if so what is the
> correct syntax?
>
> aHash = Hash.new
> aString = "BasketballTeam"
> aHash[aString] => "Bulls"

Drop the greater than symbol in the last line:

aHash[aString] = "Bulls"

And sense we are talking, allow me to explain the variable naming  
conventions for Ruby.  ;)  We prefer to use snake_case for variable  
and method names and save the CamelCase for class and module names.   
Doing that, I would rewrite your code as:

a_hash = Hash.new
a_string = "BasketballTeam"
a_hash[a_string] = "Bulls"

Of course, "a_hash" and "a_string" don't really tell us much, so  
let's go a step further and try to pick variable names that inform us  
of what we are working with:

teams = Hash.new
team_type = "BasketballTeam"
teams[team_type] = "Bulls"

I think that reads a lot better, but you be the judge.

Hope that helps.

James Edward Gray II