I find myself using hash arguments to constructors quite a bit, especially when writing DSLs for configuration or other bits of API that the end user will be exposed to. What I end up doing is something like the following:

class Example

    PROPERTIES = [:name, :age]

    PROPERTIES.each { |p| attr_reader p }

    def initialize(args)
        PROPERTIES.each do |p|
            self.instance_variable_set "@#{p}", args[p] if not args[p].nil?
        end
    end

end

Is there no more idiomatic way to achieve this? The throw-away constant and the symbol to string conversion seem particularly egregious.