in reply to Re: How can I tell if a function has been forward declared but not yet defined?
in thread How can I tell if a function has been forward declared but not yet defined?

The subroutine &hello doesn't exist. In fact $::{hello} is &hello's prototype (as a plain string). There's no CV or CV-ish value around yet--just a plain string being the prototype. When you do *hello, \&hello or $hello you create the glob at comile-time and so $::{hello} returns a glob. This means that

sub hello; *fh = $::{hello}; *hello;
works. See Re^3: Grabbing Variable Names for an elaboration.

ihb

See perltoc if you don't know which perldoc to read!