Jim Bodwin wrote:
The current behaviour (where stringifying a thread returns the class name plus addrress) *IS* used by automatic dumpers. It is also a handy feature in interactive debuggers since you can immediately tell what kind of object a pointer is pointing too.
That is *not* the purpose of the default stringification. However, that is exactly what ref() is designed to provide. There are plenty of objects which are opaque collections, not intended to be poked at randomly by _any_ code, and which provide overloaded stringification or numification, etc (HINT: I've published several of them to CPAN). Any automatic dumper which is relying /exclusively/ on the default stringification to elicit any information about the class of an object is broken, evil code that should be overwritten with random bytes.
If this change is made then thread objects will be different from every other object class in the world - and that is a bad thing. Automatic dumpers and tree walkers will have to add special code for this.
As you might guess, I think you are completely offbase here. Any class which provides it own overloading for stringification and/or numification is in the same boat as what the proposed changes for thread objects. And no special handling is required to handle them, either. Using the approved methods to interrogate the object is not that difficult. Violate the sanctity of my opaque objects at your peril, Sir! ;-)
John -- John Peacock Director of Information Research and Technology Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group 4501 Forbes Boulevard Suite H Lanham, MD 20706 301-459-3366 x.5010 fax 301-429-5748
