On Sat, 2002-11-30 at 21:51, Michael Lazzaro wrote: > Joseph Ryan wrote: > > >That's the question of whether stringification will strictly be > > >serializing, or whether that will be a method call and stringification > > >should "look pretty" or "be useful". I prefer the latter. > > > > Same. > > Can you define a good preferred "useful"? I find the current behavior > of references (stringify to a weird address thing) to be annoying; > people sometimes use it to test (for example) whether two references are > identical, but hopefully we'll be able to offer something better than that.
It's simply a definition of semantics. Objects can define their own stringification routines, but how does a code reference stringify? A reference to a reference? A reference to a hash that contains references to arrays which hold code references? Circular referencing? You could hold forth Data::Dumper as an example, but people don't really use that for stringification. (BTW, direct mail to you, from me, never gets through. Times out.) -- Bryan C. Warnock bwarnock@(gtemail.net|raba.com)
