[cosmo7]

Well Scala does that () thing too. On the other hand, an infinite loop in Scala would run much more quickly than in Ruby.

[jorgeortiz85]

In Scala, defining a method and a variable with the same name would be a compile-time error.

[carbon8]

A situation like the OP's would run in an infinite loop even in Scala. There's no compile-time error in Scala when you have a method call itself, which is what the OP is describing, and his variable also wasn't named the same as the method: "@name" vs "name".