Too much magic ?

hey ya'll, i'm working on an I18N extension for PHP5 which takes full advantage of the new OOP support in ZE2, including the cast handler. right now you can do something like this : I18N_SetOutputEncoding("Latin-1"); /* set global output encoding */ $unistring = new UnicodeString( $sjisString, "sjis"); /* convert from sjis to Unicode */ echo "Latinized string : $unistring"; /* uses the cast handler to convert $unistring to latin1 */ my question is - is this too much magic, and can it come back to bite me in the butt ? i think it makes sense in this instance, but i think generally string casts of objects (in Java especially) are used primarily to get a representation for debugging rather than end-user output (IOW, give an indication of internal state). another example (not yet implemented) is as follows : $cal = Calendar::createInstance(TimeZone::getDefault(), Locale::getFrench()); echo "Current time is : $cal \n"; /* mardi 21 octobre 2003 07 h 35 GMT-04:00, output in Latin1 */ this seems in the spirit of PHP, but i want to know if people can spot possible drawbacks. l0t3k