I know about Object#tap, which takes a value and returns that value. But is there a method that takes a block and returns the value evaluated by the block?
What you're looking for is essentially the equivalent of let in Lisp or OCaml — something that allows you to temporarily bind a value to an identifier without introducing a new variable into the larger scope. There isn't anything that lets you do such a thing with that syntax in Ruby. The equivalent Ruby would be:
lambda {|value| deck.index(value).tap {|index|
STDERR.puts "Result of indexing for #{value.inspect} is #{index.inspect}"
} }.call 'A'
You could of course just write a method like:
def let(*values)
yield *values
end