Your question's context is writen very poorly! DEFINED could mean so many different things in Perl it's not even funny. Did you mean DEFINED variables? Please re-phrase your question to be more speicific than just, DEFINED?. I might be able to help after I know what to help with.
I'd say my question was just arcane not poorly stated.
I was referring to DEFINED as mentioned in some editions of
perlfaq4. I spent a lot of time looking. I guess I looked
at the wrong version of the docs today. Very frustrating to search with all the false hits on "defined". Blind
tries to use it as a magic variable, a la $AUTOLOAD, and
as a routine like EXISTS were all fruitless.
Given that I have no idea what it is/does, and mentioned the connection
to tie; I couldn't improve my query much. The first three responses in this thread all got
the context of my question so I don't think I was that vague.
I could have made it clearer
that I was referring to a defined part of Perl
but most
got that anyway, probably from my contrast to "defined".
Thanks for the criticism. For me it's a battle between a tendency to run on, and on, and on, you know, a natural tendency toward verbosity and poor, complex sentence structures and being
too brief.