I hate this in Class::DBI. I've gone down many a fruitless debuging path trying to figure out why a variable that was supposed to have an object in it for some reason ended up with a number.

Things should look like what they are when you print them. You might be able to satisfy your need for a better hash-key and better debugging statements by stringifying to "THREAD OBJECT (ID $id)" or something similarly unmistakable.

-sam