B::Terse(3) Perl Programmers Reference Guide B::Terse(3) 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 in- formation 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 pro- grammer. 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 com- patible 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 in- formation 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, . This wrapper was written by Stephen McCamant, . perl v5.44.0 2026-05-14 B::Terse(3)