> Whatever happended to the good old days of just running the method and
> catching NameError and ArgumentError?

Agreed.  As I said in my later messages, I imagine noone would actually use 
the code I hacked up.  I probably won't; it was just fun to try writing it 
:-).

One comment, though, is that sometimes it's better to catch problems earlier, 
rather than later.  Partially executing the code of a method, only to throw 
an exception later on, may be an issue, in some cases.

Don't ask me to give a good example, but think of it as akin to a transaction 
in a database.  Since you don't have any easy way to undo the partial 
transaction in Ruby, it might be better not to start if you can tell 
something is going to go wrong.

H.