Re^4: Perl - Is it an OO Language

[Aristotle]

It isn't weak, it's flexible. It's that simple. You can encapsulate as strongly as you wish. It isn't even all that costly. Bottom line, the language scales, from oneliners to 2,500,000 projects. You pick from the possibilities whatever your current task necessitates. Most people, most of the time, write stuff somewhere close to the oneliner end of the range. Perl's default behaviour is therefor only sensible.

Makeshifts last the longest.

[Anonymous Monk]

It isn't weak, it's flexible. It's that simple

And C isn't a weak OO language, it's flexible! You have the freedom to build any OO framework you like with C. I'll leave you with a quote from TheDamian's book (page 296):

Encapsulation is one of the cornerstones of object orientation, but it's the area in which Perl's support for object-oriented programming is the weakest. ..... Fortunately, Perl's flexibility can be turned against itself to provide a means of building objects that respect the encapsulation imposed by their classes.

And this node for a discussion of (and solution for in followup) how Perl's simple inheritance breaks encapsulation of the superclass. I justify my original comment on the basis that if you need to jump through hoops to get some feature (in this case encapsulation), support for that feature is 'weak'.

[Aristotle]

C doesn't have a builtin polymorphism mechanism.

Makeshifts last the longest.

[Anonymous Monk]

Thank you, I believe you just inadvertently illustrated my point.