http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=683742

Socrates has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I develop a large, mostly-cgi user interface for network appliances. Hence, large portions of my debugging are done passively via warns, traces, croaks and such in a virtualized environment.

The other day, a coworker and I were having a discussion and were thinking it be nice to be able to have a module which implemented a special kind of debugging syntax that would normally be interpreted as regular comments if the module was not included.

For instance:

some_function_call($var); #$# warn Dumper($var);
Or a block-level approach:
#$#DEBUG some_function_call(); another_function_call(); #$#END
I suppose, then, this is more of a two-part question on the capabilities of modules.
  1. is it possible to write a module that can keep lines starting with an certain string ("#$#" in this case) from being treated as comments like other lines beginning with "#"?
  2. could a module enable verbose tracing and execution, but only of certain specially-tagged blocks of code?
And a further supplemental question: