IMO There is a big advantage to the first style however: it actually defines the subs in such a way that you don't get weird error messages about stuff happening in an anon sub. Likewise you can set breakpoints in the debugger and stuff with the former but with the latter its not so easy. There are ways around this, but they aren't straight-forward.

use Carp qw(confess);

local *foo=sub { confess "What the fook!" };

eval qq[sub bar { confess "What the wook!" } 1 ]
    or die "failed to eval code: $@";

eval {
    foo(); 1
} or print $@;

eval {
    bar(); 1
} or print $@;

__END__
What the fook! at c:\temp\die.pl line 3
    main::__ANON__() called at c:\temp\die.pl line 9
    eval {...} called at c:\temp\die.pl line 8
What the wook! at (eval 1) line 1
    main::bar() called at c:\temp\die.pl line 13
    eval {...} called at c:\temp\die.pl line 12
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