Is it good practice to override inline-value classes

toString

to the value? We’ve had issues where wrapping a primitive to an inline class requires checking all usages of it specially when the primitive value is already being passed directly as a String. Wondering if anyone is doing it by default.

Using

toString

for anything other than debugging/logging is something I try to avoid, to be honest. Better to have a separate dedicated conversion method for anything that has a specific, well-defined string representation.

I'd rather UUID had a

toCanonicalRepresentation

or something slightly less verbose

Notwithstanding the advice from Sam and Phil, if you still want to override

toString

, the way you should do it should depend on what the inline class represents, rather than what it holds. For example, say you are currently holding a list of strings representing IP addresses, such as

listOf("123.45.6.7", ...)

. You decide to optimize it using an inline class holding an

Int

. You should then make the

toString

print the original (traditional) representation of the IP address rather than the Int itself.