I'm in complete agreement with the refactoring principle you cite.

I guess I don't agree with the substantive call you're making in this case: something with UNIVERSAL in its name is likely to give me more pause than a simple eval. As well as seeing Module->require, which until I *know* about UNIVERSAL::require, looks (to me) like a bug.

I'd agree with you if you said the same thing about SUPER, though, because (mostly because I usually use superclass methods more often than funky requires) it solves a sorer problem and is thus more worth learning about.

Hey, you can always create a "require_module" method. I don't expect to need such a method in more than one place per project.