Re: Confused by OO & tie

[hardburn]

tie does have something to do with OO, but in a far more abstract sense. In OO, polymorphism allows you to treat different things with perhaps wildely different implementations as if they were the same. tie lets you treat these different things as if they were just another variable. In a way, it's the best object system ever. However, it is also a rather limited object system (and slow, but that doesn't matter from a purely-theoretical point of view).

The tutorial you point to is speaking of Perl's bless-based object system. It's a very flexible system, but it's not the only object system Perl has, and may not even be the best one. It is, however, the most widely-used of Perl's object systems (tie is probably a distant second). Some of these systems might build on bless, and others may use something completely different.