Why Rails can use `if` as hash key but not in Ruby

Question

In pure Ruby irb, one cannot type {if: 1}. The statement will not terminate, because irb thinks if is not a symbol but instead the beginning of an

Answer 1

That's an irb issue, not Ruby.

bash=> ruby -e "puts({if: 1})"
bash=# {:if=>1}

You can use pry instead. It will read input correctly.

https://github.com/pry/pry