As to "[t]he contents of a subroutine [being] represented internally with a variety [of] byte code", you're both right and wrong (as is so often the case when talking about internals). The internals do deal with coderefs as pointing to a bunch of bytecode, but that bytecode is not inherently serializable; it has lots of pointers in it. Moreover (without resorting to Devel:: or B:: modules), it isn't accessable with Perl code.

The perl6 analog of Data::Dumper will be able to dump coderefs as Parrot assembler (pasm); one of the cool side-effects of going to an explicit VM.

Thanks,
James Mastros,
Just Another Perl Scribe