Here's a strange one raised on ruby-talk:247831 It looks like the parser works differently inside and outside of blocks, when dealing with spaces between method names and argument lists. $ cat x.rb x = 3 puts (x-5).abs 1.times do puts (x-5).abs end $ ruby -v ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [i486-linux] $ ruby x.rb x.rb:5: warning: don't put space before argument parentheses 2 -2 x.rb:5: undefined method `abs' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError) from x.rb:4 $ So "puts (x-5).abs" works in line 2, but not in line 5 :-( Regards, Brian.