On Nov 12, 2006, at 11:18 AM, David Vallner wrote:

> In Ruby, only instance variables are autovivified to nil, and that by
> itself is a behaviour that gets on my nerves (typo-prone).

This shouldn't be an issue, if you turn on warnings:

$ ruby warning.rb
warning.rb:4: warning: instance variable @brand_new not initialized
nil
$ cat warning.rb
#!/usr/bin/env ruby -w

# use an unassigned instance variable
p @brand_new

__END__

James Edward Gray II