You are right, as Java also has primitive types.

But on the other hand, in this case, I can choose to return, for example, an ArrayList of Integer. This is much less a problem to languages that have stronger OO support.

Update:

Thanks BUU for the extension, tie was actually something I thought of. The idea of tie, actually holds some characteristics that OO interface provides.

So why couldn't/wouldn't you do the exact same in perl? You could even do it transparently via tie, or you could do it overtly by creating the object. Seems fairly simple to me at least.


package ArrayList;

my $i;
sub new{shift;return bless{[@_]=>shift};}

sub iterate{return $_[0]->[$i++]}
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And so on and so forth.

One reason you wouldn't want to is that is Perl's context-sensitivity. By using ArrayList, which would be implemented as a scalar holding a referance, you're now putting things in scalar context that really should be in list context.

BTW--Check out the Class::Iterator module for doing this.

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

: () { :|:& };:

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated