I don't know why it wouldn't have. You should have been able to do: out = parseClosure(curr_page, cnt) { |doc,out| eval(codeStr) } ... def parseC

I don't know why it wouldn't have. You should have been able to do: out = parseClosure(curr_page, cnt) { |doc,out| eval(codeStr) } ... def parseClosure(curr_page, cnt) ... yield(doc, out) or: def parseClosure(curr_page, cnt, &codeProc) There's not much opportunity to use lambda explicity in Ruby because using blocks instead is so easy.