in reply to Adding code to a Perl program without stopping it

Yes. Specifically it is possible to reload a module. The trick is to update %INC so that a subsequent call to require reloads the module. Consider:

# reload.pl use strict; use warnings; for (1 .. 2) { delete $INC{'ReloadModule.pm'}; require ReloadModule; for (1 .. 3) { print ReloadModule::nextCount(), " "; } print "\n"; } # ReloadModule.pm use strict; use warnings; no warnings 'redefine'; package ReloadModule; my $count = 0; sub nextCount { return ++$count; } 1;

Prints:

1 2 3 1 2 3

Note the use of no warnings 'redefine'; in the module to be reloaded to suppress "Subroutine nextCount redefined at ..." warnings.

True laziness is hard work