6.8. Accessing the Symbol Table

Perl has a number of features that permit introspection, chief among them the ability to get information about the contents of the symbol table. This property is sometimes called reflection or introspection.

Reflection makes it easy to write system-level tools such as debuggers and profilers. We will also use this property in Chapter 11, to develop a module that can transparently dump an object's data to a file or a database (and subsequently restore it) without having to write any application-specific code.