This to me sounds like an object oriented Safe compartment. In a safe compartment only certain ops can be executed. Its not commonly used IMO because running untrusted code isnt much of an issue in Perl.

There's also the major problem that Safe isn't very... well... safe. There have been numerous exploits (e.g. CAN-2002-1323) and it's not really comparable to the Java sandbox IMHO.

Dealing with untrustworthy code is a real problem for some applications, and it is a pity that it is a hard problem in Perl. I recall seeing some comments that they'll be some form of decent sandboxing with Parrot so this should be able to be done nicely in Perl 6.

On a brighter note Perl does deal with untrustworthy data very well - using its taint mechanism. Something that is much harder to do in Java.