some_hash = find_hash( parameter ) rescue find_hash( parameter, more_info ) rescue Hash.new

You know what, I never thought using the rescue keyword this way. Thanks for the input.

While it’s true that dynamic typing allows you to accomplish more with less code, you will inevitably run into more run-time vs. compile-time exceptions. Speaking from experience, the addition of strongly typed collections in Java 1.5 has resulted in far fewer bugs in my code, at the cost of additional tedious typing. My advice would be to ensure that you get complete code coverage with your unit test cases, and make sure you pass lots of random inputs into your class methods to test for unusual casting behavior.