I don't normally repond to threads I frontpage -- I usually only front page stuff I don't know the answer to -- but as it seems that all you have so far are responses confirming what you already discovered.

Having just re-read your post, I'm no longer sure that you are asking what I originally thought you were asking. Or rather, I see that you could be asking for one of 3 different things:

• The easiest way of shutting up your debug statements (using say), in this script, without fully deleting them.

  Perhaps the simplest way would be to tie stdout and make the say method do nothing.

• Or, you might be asking a more generic question of how to have debug statements that you can turn on & off with a simple boolean.

  In that case, you might consider looking at Smart::Comments.

• Or, the crux of your question might be: how to override feature enabled built-ins.

  In which case, perhaps Devel::Pragma is a starting point.

Perhaps if you make it clear whichever of those -- or whatever other -- objective is your primary goal, maybe you'll get more helpful responses.