Jim Bodwin wrote:
NOTE: I am not the author of threads, but am just an interested party.
The fact that the stringification of objects produces (by default) a
unique string in standard format is all I ask. I don't violate your
opaque objects - I just want to be able see immediately (a) the type of
object pointed to by a reference and (b) the unique code for that object.
You have a very narrow, and I might say a little bizarre, interpretation
of how Perl objects stringify. Overloading and objects are two largely
independent issues; you can have objects which don't use overloading at
all. Those objects will obviously fall prey to the default
stringification. However, object classes are completely free to create
their own overloading behavior (see below). If you are relying on all
objects to provide you with the default stringification, which was *not*
intended to be a mandatory feature of objects, merely a convenience
function, then your code *will* break, and I'm not the least bit
sorry... ;-)
What you propose is actually a change to the way that references behave
and not the way that your class behaves. That is, you want the behavior
of a reference in certain types of expressions be different depending on
the class of object that it references.
Yes, overloading allows me, as a class author, full freedom to decide
how my object will behave in different situations. It has nothing
whatsoever to do with the behavior of well-behaved introspection tools:
$ perl -Mversion -MData::Dumper -e '$vobj = qv("1.2.3");
print Data::Dumper->Dump([$vobj],['vobj']);'
$vobj = bless( {
'qv' => 1,
'version' => [
1,
2,
3
]
}, 'version' );
Here you can see that ref($vobj) would return 'version' as the class,
yet the introspection code can still understand that the underlying
object representation is a hash of scalars and arrays.
What code do you have that can't handle this? Or are you just arguing
the theoretical case?
John
--
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
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