Re: How to prevent references from stringifying?

[Jenda]

I think you might be able to do it using autobox and overload. Something like this I think:

package REF;
use overload q("") => sub { die "Attempt to stringify reference" };

package main;
use autobox 'REF' => 'REF', DEFAULT => undef;

...

You need at least perl 5.8.1 for this though. That's why I can't test the code myself. (I should update one of these days ...)

[xmath]

I just took a quick look at autobox, and in particular the patch it requires to be applied to perl... It seems it only enables method calls on non-objects, but it does not appear to extend other object-qualities such as overloading to non-objects.

So this trick wouldn't work afaict.