Hi all, i'm new to ruby and i find it very exciting, but i've two little 
question that i cannot find answers for.

First: how can i use a variable name within a regex? In other words, i 
explain it with some perl code:

#begin
use strict;

print "give me a string: ";
chomp (my $str = <stdin>);

#that's the italian version of mary poppin's
#saying (-:
my $line = "supercalifragilistichespiralidoso";
print "$1\n" if $line =~ /($str)\w+/;
#end

Now, as you can see from this stupid code, if i enter "super" as $str, 
it prints out "super".
But because i've to use the construct #{...} to interpolate a variable 
(in ruby), how can i use the trick??

Second: this is a question on the object orientation consistency of ruby 
(i'm not doubt that ruby is consistent, but i'm only a newbie that 
search for answers...).
If i declare an instance variale as attr_accessor, i can avoid to write 
getter/setter methods, but how can i surely give a value to a variable 
without writing the relative method??
I explain with an example:

class MyTime
   attr_accessor :hours, :minutes

   def initialize
      ....
      ....
   end

   ...other methods...
end

Now, without the setter methods for hours (or minutes) i can assign a 
totally inconsistent value like this:

t = MyTime.new
t.minutes = 75   # that make no sense at all!

when with a setter method i can control the input like this:

#that's only an example...i know that this method is
#totally bad!

def minutes=(value)
    if value > 60
       gap = value - 60
       minutes = gap
       hours = hours + 1
    else
       minutes = value
    end
end

How can i avoid this inconsistency without a setter method 
implementation?? attr_accessor is useless in this case? (it's so 
convenient!! (-: )

I hope that my questions are clear, sorry for my poor english!
If you have some links that talk about this topics, please tell me!
Thanks a lot!

caligari.