I don't think I follow. How does it work on non-fake subs then?

Hmm, I think we may have our wires crossed (that'll teach me for posting after 10pm ;-) My reasoning is that if your return is the call from a coderef that is pointing to the current coderef then of course it will recurse e.g

my $f = \&foo;
*foo = sub {
    print "in foo()\n";
    return &$f;
}
foo();

__output__
in foo()
in foo()
... and so on
[download]

$f is just pointing to *main::foo{CODE} and since &foo is defined by the time it is called $f will then be pointing to a fully fledged sub and it recurses. Am I missing something?
HTH

_________
broquaint

update: changed sub foo to *foo = sub {}