Question

I am trying to figure out what exactly is being processed in this simple statement:

sub testReturn {
    return sub {
        my $val = shift;
        return $val;
    }
}

when

my $num = testReturn(1);
print $num;

is called, it outputs:

CODE(0x9c63b34)

When I am trying to have it simply return the value of 1. Thank you.

Answer 1

Your function returns another function as an anonymous code block.
You can call that code to do some things for you, like this:

my $anonsub = testReturn(); # $anonsub is CODE object
my $num = &$anonsub(1);      # here this code is called
print $num;