Perl RAII test banner

Wrote a somewhat neat Perl trick today:

file RAII_Test_Banner.pm:

{
    package RAII_Test_Banner;

    sub new {   
 my $self = {};     
 $self->{'message'} = shift;    
 bless $self;     

 print "START: $self->{message}\n";

 return $self;     
    }

    sub DESTROY {
 my $self = shift;
 print "END: $self->{message}\n";
    }

}


if( $::TEST ) {
    {
 my $t = RAII_Test_Banner("Example of RAII_Test_Banner usage");
 print "something like START:  Example  ...  should be printed above\n";
 print "This is inside\n";
 print "something like END:  Example  ...  should be printed above\n";
    }
}

1;

This is just a Perl version of a C++ library I wrote years ago, when I first learned about RAII (Resource Allocation is Initialization) - aka using automatic scoping to reduce the need to write code that matches start and end.

I had not realized until today that Perl had deterministic finalization - at least for variables that are not referred to by live references.

IMHO one of the biggest weaknesses of Java is lack of deterministic finalization.