You can't overload '=' actually. They give you a half-way solution, but it's deemed un-perl-ish to allow the overload of '='. It would "go against the camel-hair" to actually overload the assignment operator.

I have found that, not only is it un-intuitive, but it just plain never works how I expect. I think your LHS would have to be an object also, but it could be something else going wrong. The simplest solution is to just call your copy function directly instead of trying to overload '='. Even if you get it to work, it's going to cause trouble again some day.

I overload most of the other operators from time to time, but I never bother trying to get the shallow-copy to work.

-Paul


In reply to Re: Overloading '=' doesn't DWIM by jettero
in thread Overloading '=' doesn't DWIM by syphilis

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