I'm using my MOO project to teach myself Test Driven Design, and it's taking me interesting places. For example, I wrote a test that said an attribute on a particular object should always return an array, so -- t = Thing.new("test") p t.names #-> ["test"] t.names = nil p t.names #-> [] The code I have for this is okay, but it doesn't seem terribly ruby to me: class Thing def initialize(names) self.names = names end def names=(n) n = [] if n.nil? n = [n] unless n.instance_of?(Array) @names = n end attr_reader :names end Is there a more elegant, Ruby-ish way of doing this? (NB: if anyone wants to tell me why this is a dumb test to write, that would be interesting too...)