A friend said,

Java’s boxing / unboxing drives me batty and I waste tons of time on it

He was referring to operations in Java 1.4 (and earlier) like:

  Collection c = new ArrayList();
  c.add(new Integer(100);
  Integer i = (Integer)c.get(0);
  int foo = i.intValue();

I’d like to know what makes a Perl hacker think

  @foo = @{ $bar[idx] };

is intuitive casting syntax.

The good news is that I’ve more or less completed a proof of concept in Perl for work. The bad news is that it had to be done in Perl.