From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2010-08-15T03:58:15+09:00
Subject: Re: hash-style parameters

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={}