PPI::St...ent::Sub(3)

💖 PPI::St...ent::Sub 💖

okay bestie so this is the manual page for PPI::St...ent::Sub(3) — like, from the User Contributed Perl Documentation, and it's genuinely iconic. sit down, grab a strawberry 🍓, we're learning about subroutine declarations today.

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✨ NAME ✨

PPI::Statement::Sub — subroutine declaration. that's it, that's the whole vibe. 👑

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🦋 INHERITANCE 🦋

the family tree goes like this, no cap:

PPI::Statement::Sub
isa PPI::Statement
    isa PPI::Node
        isa PPI::Element

so yeah, it's a whole lineage. it inherited all the good genes. 💅

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so here's the tea: except for the special BEGIN, CHECK, UNITCHECK, INIT, and END subroutines (which are literally part of PPI::Statement::Scheduled, they're in a different friend group), every single subroutine declaration gets lexed as a PPI::Statement::Sub object.

primarily that means all of the various sub foo {} statements, obviously. but ALSO forward declarations like sub foo; or sub foo($); — yes those too, they count. 🫶

⚠️ it does NOT include anonymous subroutines tho, because those are merely part of a normal statement. not their moment. 💀

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💜 METHODS 💜

PPI::Statement::Sub has a number of methods in addition to the standard PPI::Statement, PPI::Node and PPI::Element methods. so it's like, extra. spoiled, even. and we love that for it. 😌

🎀 name

the name method returns the name of the subroutine being declared.

in some rare cases, such as a naked sub at the end of the file, this may return false. so like, sometimes it just doesn't have a name and that's fine, it's giving mystery. 🙈

🎀 prototype

if it has one, the prototype method returns the subroutine's prototype. it comes back in the same format as prototype in PPI::Token::Prototype, cleaned and removed from its brackets. ✨

it returns the subroutine's prototype, or undef if the subroutine does not define one. note that when the sub has an empty prototype (()) the return is an empty string — not undef, an empty string. don't get it twisted bestie, those are different things. 💅

🎀 block

with its name and implementation shared with PPI::Statement::Scheduled, the block method finds and returns the actual Structure object of the code block for this subroutine.

returns false if this is a forward declaration, or otherwise does not have a code block. no block, no return, periodt.

🎀 forward

the forward method returns true if the subroutine declaration is a forward declaration.

that is, it returns false if the subroutine has a code block, or true if it does not. it's literally just that simple. 🦋

🎀 reserved

the reserved method is a lil convenience method for checking to see if this is a special reserved subroutine. it does not check against any particular list of reserved sub names, but just returns true if the name is all uppercase, as defined in perlsub. uppercase = reserved, that's the whole rule. 🔥

💀 note that in the case of BEGIN, CHECK, UNITCHECK, INIT and END, these will be defined as PPI::Statement::Scheduled objects, not subroutines. again. different friend group.

returns true if it is a special reserved subroutine, or false if not.

🎀 type

the type method checks and returns the declaration type of the statement, which will be one of 'my', 'our', or 'state'. so fancy. 🌈

returns a string of the type, or "undef" if the type is not declared.

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🫶 SUPPORT 🫶

see the support section in the main module. (go look, it's right there, i believe in you ✨)

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Adam Kennedy <adamk@cpan.org>

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🌸 COPYRIGHT 🌸

Copyright 2001 - 2011 Adam Kennedy.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

The full text of the license can be found in the LICENSE file included with this module.

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and that's the whole page bestie, you ate that fr fr 💅✨ this was PPI::St...ent::Sub(3) from perl v5.42.0, dated 2026-01-17 — main character energy, no notes, mwah 🎀💖