in reply to Re: Calling a function that may not be there...
in thread Calling a function that may not be there...

Edited becuase as Dominus pointed out, I was incorrect, and I wanted to disentangle my two points.

If you simply wanted to call a bunch of subroutines in order you could be more clever:

my @funcs = ();
push @funcs, 
    sub { print "middle\n"; },
    sub { print "bottom\n"; };

push @funcs, some_subroutine_that_returns_sub_refs();

foreach my $sub (@funcs) {
    &$sub;
}

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By passing the subroutine references around you can do lots of powerful things without depending on global subroutine names. It all depends on what you are really trying to do.

-ben

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Re: Calling a function that may not be there...
by Dominus (Parson) on Mar 27, 2001 at 21:26 UTC
    Said knobunc:
    That would work if there was a reference to the function involved. The original case had a simple subroutine definition.
    OK, you're wrong, and you obviously didn't try it, or even look in the manual.

    Says perlfunc:defined:

    You may also use defined(&func) to check whether subroutine &func has ever been defined.
    With all that code you wrote to show off, I would have thought you could also write the following three-line test to avoid embarassing yourself: 
        sub a1 {} 
    print "a1 is defined\n" if defined &a1;
    print "a2 is defined\n" if defined &a2;

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