B::Terse(3pm)

🌸 NAME 🌸

okay so bestie, welcome to B::Terse(3pm) from the Perl Programmers Reference Guide 👑. This page is about: Walk Perl syntax tree, printing terse info about ops ✨.

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

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

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

So this module prints the contents of the parse tree, but without as much info as the CPAN module B::Debug. For comparison, print "Hello, world." produced 96 lines of output from B::Debug, but only 6 from B::Terse. The way that’s giving “less is more” 😌.

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. ngl, it’s giving niche icon energy 💅.

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. periodt.

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. 💀

Careful, bestie: that B::OP "terse" thing can give the wrong answer or crash for OPs in subroutines — fr fr, not a vibe. 🫶

🫶 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>. iconic work, honestly 👑.

---

mwah 💋 — this page comes from perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-11-03, and it’s B::Terse(3pm). bye bestie! 💖