I was working on a program that needed to check the syntax of a short perl script prior to accepting it as input. To do this test the script was saved to a file and "perl -c -w script.pl" was called. (via a system call to the shell) The -c flag is supposed to cause the script to be compiled, but not executed.

Well this worked ok, but I had a problem where a user had made a call to a function that did not exist. This wasn't caught until the script was executed, not good!

So I started trying to figure out how this slipped past, and I couldn't. Perl does not notice a non-existent function (or subroutine or whatever you want to call it) at compile time. Does anyone know why this is?

I was thinking it might be because you could somehow dynamically create the function or something... but I don't know how to do that either, not including the use of eval.

In reply to -c by Adam

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