Making things the hard way

[kyonides]

Actually I disagree with your previous correction, wulfo. It's true one should make sure that a method will work as expected, BUT that doesn't mean we should always do things like turning a "Fred" string into a an integer.

The actual way coders work with non web based stuff, where you can get a 404 error message if the webpage could not be found, would be raising an error by calling the raise Kernel method and posting a descriptive error message on screen. It would not be necessary if Ruby were strong typed as C and C++ are, but being weak typed forces Ruby coders to add conditions or raising errors whenever it's needed.

raise would be the best way to tell the coder or game developer that they should go fix the error found in a given line. The backtrace feature was implemented for that very same reason. I hope you already knew about those features and used them accordingly. Otherwise you would have been "stealing" the coder the chance to debug his or her game or code.