# phpman > man > B::Terse

## NAME
    [B::Terse](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/B%3A%3ATerse/markdown) - 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 CPAN
    module [B::Debug](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/B%3A%3ADebug/markdown). For comparison, "print "Hello, world."" produced 96 lines of output from
    [B::Debug](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/B%3A%3ADebug/markdown), but only 6 from [B::Terse](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/B%3A%3ATerse/markdown).

    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](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/B%3A%3ATerse/markdown) is really just a wrapper that calls [B::Concise](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/B%3A%3AConcise/markdown) with the -terse option.
    It is provided for compatibility with old scripts (and habits) but using [B::Concise](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/B%3A%3AConcise/markdown) directly is
    now recommended instead.

    For compatibility with the old [B::Terse](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/B%3A%3ATerse/markdown), this module also adds a method named "terse" to [B::OP](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/B%3A%3AOP/markdown)
    and [B::SV](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/B%3A%3ASV/markdown) objects. The [B::SV](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/B%3A%3ASV/markdown) 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](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/B%3A%3AOP/markdown) "terse"
    method, however, doesn't work well. Since [B::Terse](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/B%3A%3ATerse/markdown) 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](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/perldoc/B%3A%3ATerse/markdown) was written by Malcolm Beattie, <<mbeattie@sable.ox.ac.uk>>. This
    wrapper was written by Stephen McCamant, <<smcc@MIT.EDU>>.