Further to Your Mother's reply: Because Perl has no  main() function and allows intermixing function calls and definitions, strange things can happen. Better by far, IMHO, to have someone put in a function call and scratch their head (even for quite a while) about why it is never executed than to have the code compile and apparently run correctly for hours/days/weeks/... before realizing that, hey, something ain't right! Here's an (admittedly rather contrived) example of goofy behavior: 

c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le
"S(3);
 T();
 S(9);
 T();
 ;;
 exit_here_to_avoid_weirdness();
 ;;
 my $x = 42;
 sub S { $x = $_[0];  printf qq{in S: x == $x  };  T(); }
 ;;
 sub T { ++$x;  print qq{in T: x == $x}; }
 ;;
 sub exit_here_to_avoid_weirdness { ;;; }
 T();
"
in S: x == 3  in T: x == 4
in T: x == 5
in S: x == 9  in T: x == 10
in T: x == 11
in T: x == 43

[download]
Is that 43 result from the last call to  T() correct? Maybe better not to make it at all: 
c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le
"S(3);
 T();
 S(9);
 T();
 ;;
 exit_here_to_avoid_weirdness();
 ;;
 my $x = 42;
 sub S { $x = $_[0];  printf qq{in S: x == $x  };  T(); }
 ;;
 sub T { ++$x;  print qq{in T: x == $x}; }
 ;;
 sub exit_here_to_avoid_weirdness { exit; }
 T();
"
in S: x == 3  in T: x == 4
in T: x == 5
in S: x == 9  in T: x == 10
in T: x == 11

[download]
(Of course, it would be nice to have a "code not reachable" message, but that's life.)

Give a man a fish:  <%-{-{-{-<

In reply to Re: exit this way by AnomalousMonk
in thread exit this way by ExReg

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