Thanks for pointing out the try method (it is important to note that it is avaible to anyone using Active Support, not only Rails apps). It is mildly different

Thanks for pointing out the try method (it is important to note that it is avaible to anyone using Active Support, not only Rails apps). It is mildly different (syntax mostly). All of these are attempts to recreate the elvis operator tha Groovy[1] (nowadays present as the The Existential Operator in Coffescript[2]) have. For better chaining, the Maybe monad can be implemented in Ruby[3]. However they really shine on Haskell and Scala because they have, respectively, do notation and for comprehensions, which effectively work (on this restricted case of handling nulls) as a scope were nulls are ignored. Doing this with ruby is possible, but requires AST metaprogramming[4], which is the sort of thing that LISP macros do (and is quite suitable to accomplish in LISP[6], as it is homoiconic[5], while Ruby isn't). [1] http://groovy.codehaus.org/Operators#Operators-ElvisOperator%28%3F%3A%29 http://groovy.codehaus.org/Operators#Operators-ElvisOperator... [2] http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/#operators http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/#operators [3] http://pretheory.wordpress.com/2008/02/14/the-maybe-monad-in-ruby/ http://pretheory.wordpress.com/2008/02/14/the-maybe-monad-in... [4] http://metaphysicaldeveloper.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/rubyunderscore-a-bit-of-arc-and-scala-in-ruby/ http://metaphysicaldeveloper.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/rubyun... [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity [6] http://onclojure.com/2009/03/06/a-monad-tutorial-for-clojure-programmers-part-2/ http://onclojure.com/2009/03/06/a-monad-tutorial-for-clojure...