Perl is an interpreted language, so there's no compilation stage. Perl claims to have a compilation stage, by which the documentation means that the lexer and

Perl is an interpreted language, so there's no compilation stage. Perl claims to have a compilation stage, by which the documentation means that the lexer and parser produce an optree, which the runtime phase traverses. During that compilation stage, it's possible to run code which changes how the parser will treat subsequent syntactic elements.