B::Terse
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 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.
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>.