I would guess it's a bug, because the program behaves more in line with your (and my) expectations on Perl 5.12:
use Symbol;
use 5.012;
{
package Foo;
sub TIEHANDLE {
my ($sClass, $fh) = @_;
return bless([$fh], $sClass);
}
sub PRINT {
my $self = shift;
my $fh = $self->[0];
CORE::print $fh "tied to $self:", @_;
}
}
my $x=gensym;
tie *$x, 'Foo', \*STDOUT;
local $\="\n***\n";
say "Not tied: I'm just saying ...";
say $x "I'm just saying ...";
# outputs (note that say $x is followed by "\n***\n"
# not "\n"
#
# Not tied: I'm just saying ...
# tied to Foo=ARRAY(0x8197ed0):I'm just saying ...
# ***
This is on Strawberry Perl 5.12:
This is perl 5, version 12, subversion 1 (v5.12.1) built for MSWin32-x
+86-multi-thread