Perhaps I was unclear -- I and probably over half of HN are familiar with that trick already. However, to my knowledge there was no pithy, memorable name for th

Perhaps I was unclear -- I and probably over half of HN are familiar with that trick already. However, to my knowledge there was no pithy, memorable name for this practice before. It's a good practice in almost any language, BTW. In scripting languages, the error will either be caught at parse time or maybe at runtime, but at least it will be noticed.