What is the most elegant way to implement this function:

ArrayList generatePrimes(int n)

This function generates the first n primes (edit: where n>1), so generatePrimes(5) will return an ArrayList with {2, 3, 5, 7, 11}. (I'm doing this in C#, but I'm happy with a Java implementation - or any other similar language for that matter (so not Haskell)).

I do know how to write this function, but when I did it last night it didn't end up as nice as I was hoping. Here is what I came up with:

ArrayList generatePrimes(int toGenerate)
{
    ArrayList primes = new ArrayList();
    primes.Add(2);
    primes.Add(3);
    while (primes.Count 

I'm not too concerned about speed, although I don't want it to be obviously inefficient. I don't mind which method is used (naive or sieve or anything else), but I do want it to be fairly short and obvious how it works.

Edit: Thanks to all who have responded, although many didn't answer my actual question. To reiterate, I wanted a nice clean piece of code that generated a list of prime numbers. I already know how to do it a bunch of different ways, but I'm prone to writing code that isn't as clear as it could be. In this thread a few good options have been proposed:

• A nicer version of what I originally had (Peter Smit, jmservera and Rekreativc)
• A very clean implementation of the sieve of Eratosthenes (starblue)
• Use Java's BigIntegers and nextProbablePrime for very simple code, although I can't imagine it being particularly efficient (dfa)
• Use LINQ to lazily generate the list of primes (Maghis)
• Put lots of primes in a text file and read them in when necessary (darin)

Edit 2: I've implemented in C# a couple of the methods given here, and another method not mentioned here. They all find the first n primes effectively (and I have a decent method of finding the limit to provide to the sieves).