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It must have been around revision 1.260 of parse.y that colons came into expression play. And, progressively, colons are getting more airtime in Ruby 1.9. Yet another thing I forgot to mention in What’s Shiny and New in Ruby 1.8.0?

Rather handy for laying out a short if..elsif series:

 unit_of_time =
   if num < 60:              "second" 
   elsif num < 60 * 60:      "minute" 
   elsif num < 60 * 60 * 24: "hour" 
   else                      "day" 
   end

Also, in case..when:

 unit_of_time =
   case num
   when 0..60:           "second" 
   when 0..60 * 60:      "minute" 
   when 0..60 * 60 * 24: "hour" 
   else                  "day" 
   end

Did you know you can also use keyword then in place of all the colons above?

And if you want to your colon use to come to a head, try this in Ruby 1.9:

  me = {name: "_why", url: "http://redhanded.hobix.com",
        photo: "http://whytheluckystiff.net/i.home/boy.gif"}