Of course, one of the common knocks on Ruby is that naively referring to a function executes it, and to pass functions around avoiding list.map { |i| process

Of course, one of the common knocks on Ruby is that naively referring to a function executes it, and to pass functions around avoiding list.map { |i| process i } one must write list.map &method(:process) or, as the Rails guys have done [1], open up Symbol#to_proc so that list.map &:process works. This will be part of core Ruby in 1.9, but last I heard it's slow [2]. [1] http://github.com/rails/rails/tree/master/activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/symbol.rb http://github.com/rails/rails/tree/master/activesupport/lib/... [2] http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/161089 http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/161089