Re^2: Getting the value of a pointer

Agreed.

Digression: One place where you may see explicit stringification is when using Class::DBI, where stringification produces a (numerical) primary key.

# untested
my $object = Foo->retrieve(1234); # an object
&function_needing_int_not_object('' . $object);
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Re^3: Getting the value of a pointer by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jul 18, 2005 at 19:49 UTC
That's odd. It should overload numerification and numerical ops instead of (or in additon to) stringification. There is only one case where stringification is needed that comes to mind: When the function behaves differently whether a parameter is a string* or an object, and the parameter is an object with an overloaded stringification operator. For example, `sub output { my ($fh, ...) = @_ if (!ref($fh) && ref($fh) ne 'GLOB') { open($fh, '>>', $fh); } ... }` [download] * or number vs object, or boolean vs object	[reply] [d/l]

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Re^3: Getting the value of a pointer
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jul 18, 2005 at 19:49 UTC

That's odd. It should overload numerification and numerical ops instead of (or in additon to) stringification.

There is only one case where stringification is needed that comes to mind: When the function behaves differently whether a parameter is a string* or an object, and the parameter is an object with an overloaded stringification operator. For example,

sub output {
   my ($fh, ...) = @_

   if (!ref($fh) && ref($fh) ne 'GLOB') {
      open($fh, '>>', $fh);
   }

   ...
}
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* or number vs object, or boolean vs object

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[d/l]