B::Terse - Walk Perl syntax tree, printing terse info about ops
| Use Case | Command | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Walk Perl syntax tree (terse output) | perl -MO=Terse foo.pl | Print terse info about ops |
| Use B::Concise (recommended) | perl -MO=Concise,-terse foo.pl | Same output, modern alternative |
| Access terse method from code | $op->terse() or $sv->terse() | Get terse representation of OP or SV object |
perl -MO=Terse[,OPTIONS] foo.pl
This module prints the contents of the parse tree, but without as much information as CPAN module 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.
The original version of B::Terse was written by Malcolm Beattie, <mbeattie AT sable.uk>. This wrapper was written by Stephen McCamant, <smcc AT MIT.EDU>.
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