(fixed some ugly formatting)

From perl -V on my system: "This is perl, v5.6.0 built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread".

And from my man pages:

exists EXPR

    ...  (EDIT: stuff about hash, then)

Given an expression that specifies the name of a subroutine, 
returns true if the specified subroutine has ever been declared,
even if it is undefined.  Mentioning a subroutine name for 
exists or defined does not count as declaring it.

         print "Exists\n"    if exists &subroutine;
         print "Defined\n"   if defined &subroutine;

Maybe you have a different version of perl? Or maybe this is explicitly a win32 thing? I don't know myself. But I do know the code works on my machine :)

AHA! it's an activestate thing at least: http://velocity.activestate.com/docs/ActivePerl/lib/Pod/perlfunc.html#item_exists