B::Terse

Section: Perl Programmers Reference Guide (3perl)
Updated: 2019-04-20
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NAME

B::Terse - Walk Perl syntax tree, printing terse info about ops

SYNOPSIS

        perl -MO=Terse[,OPTIONS] foo.pl

DESCRIPTION

This module prints the contents of the parse tree, but without as much information as B::Debug. For comparison, "print "Hello, world."" produced 96 lines of output from B::Debug, but only 6 from B::Terse.

This module is useful for people who are writing their own back end, or who are learning about the Perl internals. It's not useful to the average programmer.

This version of B::Terse is really just a wrapper that calls B::Concise with the -terse option. It is provided for compatibility with old scripts (and habits) but using B::Concise directly is now recommended instead.

For compatibility with the old B::Terse, this module also adds a method named "terse" to B::OP and B::SV objects. The B::SV method is largely compatible with the old one, though authors of new software might be advised to choose a more user-friendly output format. The B::OP "terse" method, however, doesn't work well. Since B::Terse was first written, much more information in OPs has migrated to the scratchpad datastructure, but the "terse" interface doesn't have any way of getting to the correct pad. As a kludge, the new version will always use the pad for the main program, but for OPs in subroutines this will give the wrong answer or crash.

AUTHOR

The original version of B::Terse was written by Malcolm Beattie, <mbeattie@sable.ox.ac.uk>. This wrapper was written by Stephen McCamant, <smcc@MIT.EDU>.