... could you perhaps share the situation you're in where it would be handy for these two to behave differently?

Firstly, I see what you mean by the expectation that print $blessed_obj; and print "$blessed_obj"; should do the same thing. (A nicely insightful observation :-)

My question came about this way:
In C, users of the mpfr library will output values to stdout using the mpfr_out_str function - which prints directly to stdout (rather than return a string which one can then print to stdout). As regards Math::MPFR (which wraps the mpfr library function), I thought "Wouldn't it be nice if print was overloaded to use mpfr_out_str ... then C and Perl are guaranteed of producing the same output." But then, that would mean that every time someone did $x = "$blessed_obj"; the value encapsulated in $blessed_obj is going to be printed to stdout ... and that's probably not what's intended :-)

Anyway, as you've just demonstrated, there's a very good reason that print and "" should be overloaded by the same function ... so I think that's the end of that train of thought. Probably better to have print and "" overloaded by a function that returns a string that emulates the mpfr_out_str output - as is currently the case. Only problem there is that, since the mpfr library itself doesn't provide such a function, I have to hand craft my own ... and therein lies the potential for discrepancies.

Thanks jbert.

Cheers,
Rob

In reply to Re^2: Overloading print() by syphilis
in thread Overloading print() by syphilis

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