I've used overloading for this. For example sybperl (the Sybase::CTlib and Sybase::DBlib modules) can fetch data from the server and keep it in native format for DATETIME, NUMERIC and MONEY data types.

I've got something like this to make it work:

package Sybase::CTlib::DateTime;

# Sybase DATETIME handling.

# For converting to Unix time:

require Time::Local;


# Here we set up overloading operators
# for certain operations.

use overload ("\"\"" => \&d_str,        # convert to string
         "cmp" => \&d_cmp,        # compare two dates
         "<=>" => \&d_cmp);        # same thing

sub d_str {
    my $self = shift;

    $self->str;
}
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The str() method is in the XS module, and could maybe be called directly - I don't remember - I wrote this about 7 years ago :-)

Michael