That struck me at first as bizarre - but is it because one can override a toString method with something that has side-effects? (Or give a user-defined class a tosSring() with side-effects, I suppose.)
I'm confused. Do people not overload toString() on a regular basis along with .equals() and .hashCode() anymore? Common case was prettyprinting of deep object structures, and yes, technically, you could update state while doing it, but dear God, why? Hell, API method names don't actually mean squat as far as the JVM is concerned. It's just the consensus of the community to go with convention over config. If everyone does the same thing with methods of the same name, it decreases cognitive overhead.
Did I fall into an alternate dimension where 90% of Java seems to only use preexisting objects now, and people hardly ever write their own code?
(No disrespect to the asker; it's just such a surprising question to stumble across, that mentally speaking, I had to deoptomize my mental model of the world to accommodate for people who may not have worked much with Java).
I get functional is all the rage, but wow. Default toString() impl is inherited from Object, and basically gives you class and instance number.
