Feature #9445: Support emitting 1.9 Symbol keyword Hash syntax when pretty printing Hashes

• Status: Open
• Assignee: -
• Target version: -

[postmodern (Hal Brodigan)]

Ruby 1.9 first introduced support for keyword Hash syntax for simple Symbol keys. However, Hash#inspect and pp do not emit the same syntax when printing Symbol keys. This patch adds support for "foo: " syntax to the pp_hash method, iff the key is a Symbol and does not contain any spaces or special characters. While the patch is probably not perfect, I hope to start a discussion.

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

Mixing foo: and bar => doesn't seem pretty to me.

[postmodern (Hal Brodigan)]

While it may not be pretty, it is still valid Ruby syntax. If others disagree with mixing the two syntaxes, I can adjust the patch.

[phluid61 (Matthew Kerwin)]

I think it's better to not add unnecessary complexity. After all, we don't represent strings with single quotes, even when they don't contain escaped characters, and even when they do contain double-quote characters.