note adamk Well, by "race easily" I mean for example that some uses of STORABLE_thaw are something like... <code> sub STORABLE_thaw { my ($self, $string, @refs) = @_; ... %$self = %rebuilt_contents; } </code> Now, if called in scalar context, that should return the number of elements in the listified hash, which won't be a problem. But it's only safe accidentally, not by design. The original author was told that anything that might be returned would be ignored.<br> <br> But there is the potential for one of these cases where the function doesn't have an explicit "return;" to accidentally return a different object of the same class, which the new behaviour would interpret as an alternate object and treat incorrectly. 437784 437787