Now, tell me why you would do the vile, evil thing you did.

:-)

I might do it when you have an object that can usefully be treated as another perl type. For example consider an class like this:

my $account = Account->new(;
$account->add_transaction(30, 'food')->add_transaction(3, 'comics')
    ->add_transaction(99, 'food');

# get the second transaction
my $transaction = $account->[1];

# get all the food transactions
my $array_ref = $account->{food};
[download]

I freely admit there are other APIs that would allow you to do the same thing. You could also implement the above with tie instead of overloading. However, overloading is not a totally insane solution if you just need read access.