From: Balint Erdi <balint.erdi@...>
Date: 2009-05-22T20:10:09+09:00
Subject: "consuming" the hash instead of just fetching from it

Hi,

Deleting (vs. just fetching) the hash key from an options hash that
was passed in as an argument to the method seems prevalent. I saw it
in several high-quality OS projects (e.g DataMapper, Rails)

For example:

unless options.delete(:only_path)
        url << (options.delete(:protocol) || 'http')
        url << '://' unless url.match("://")
        ...
end

I wonder what advantage the above snippet has instead of writing:

unless options[:only_path]
        url << (options[:protocol] || 'http')
        url << '://' unless url.match("://")
        ...
end

Thank you,
Balint