Thanks, AnomalousMonk, for the explanation. Your statement:

the CORE namespace has search precedence.

raises a new question: How, then, does the original code ever find the print sub defined in namespace main if the sub isn’t explicitly qualified with its namespace (i.e., main::print)? Why doesn’t Perl always find CORE::print?

I think I found the answer: the original code works only because it uses a reference to the sub:

-command=> \&print
[download]

and in this case the reference is disambiguated using lexical scope. I found an explanation of the latter in the Camel Book, 4th Edition, “Name Lookups,” pages 62–65. Is there any documentation on how Perl looks up subroutine names when a subroutine is actually called (as opposed to being referenced)?

Thanks,