Hacking Ruby's Default Arguments

I don't quite see this as "hacking" anything, but it's a useful thing to know.

Along similar lines, I was coding some Ruby and calling a method that took a flag argument. E.g.

    save_something @something, true

and it bothered my that it was not obvious what that last value was for.

I figured that one approach might be to create a throwaway variable and use it in place of the literal:

      overwrite_existing = true
      save_something @something, overwrite_existing

... and then decided to just pass that first expression in as the argument itself to tighten things up:

      save_something @something, overwrite_existing = true

Basically, a handy (hackish?) way to document any argument.