Throwing exceptions is nice, but handling them can get a bit of a chore. One of the main reasons: constant reindenting of your code because you insert or remove a begin end section. While your text editor should be able to cope with that just fine, reindenting is just a mess in source control. But, for trivial cases, we can call Ruby to the rescue!

Default arguments are an often used feature of the Ruby programming language. Their basic syntax is simple:

def foo(bar = nil)
  bar == nil
end

This gives us two ways to make sure that foo evaluates to true:

a = nil
foo #=> true
foo("a") #=> false
foo(a) #=> true

Curious as we are, there is one question left: How do we detect whether the caller passed no argument or that he passed an argument, which just happened to be nil?

Its one of our hobbies and thats why it became launch categories as well: weird ruby tricks. This category will show small ruby tricks that allows you to take a glimpse at how the language works. Some of them are useful, some are not, but usually fun...