Why does toString() exist? It seems useless.

[Robert Fraser]

Benji Smith wrote:
> Don wrote:
>> I cannot understand the rationale for a toString() member function 
>> which doesn't support formatting.
> 
> I agree.
> 
> In Java, the toString() method *must* exist on the base Object class, 
> because of constructs like this:
> 
>    String s = "hello" + (new World());
> 
> Without an implementation of toString(), it'd be impossible to support 
> those kinds of automatic String conversion and concatenation (which 
> actually do end up being pretty handy in logging & debugging statements).
> 
> But since D doesn't support implicit String conversion, it seems pretty 
> pointless.

I think both Tango and phobos allow objects to be converted to strings 
when specified as parameters to a formatting function -- i.e. 
Stdout.format("{0}", obj) will call obj.toString().