A few weeks ago I wrote an arti­cle cov­er­ing six ways to do sub­rou­tine sig­na­tures and type con­straints in Perl. Some of the feed­back I got indi­cat­ed that there were more options to con­sid­er, so for the pre­sen­ta­tion I gave at Houston Perl Mongers I quick­ly sum­ma­rized at the end sev­en more mod­ules from CPAN that offer these fea­tures. Still more feed­back showed that I had missed five more mod­ules, so at the risk of becom­ing ​“the sig­na­tures guy” here they are.

Class::ParamParser (updated)

First released in 2000 as part of a larg­er project, this may be the first general-​purpose para­me­ter pars­er to appear on CPAN. Although the doc­u­men­ta­tion exam­ples use it as a par­ent class, you should fol­low the sug­ges­tion fur­ther down and use its two meth­ods params_to_hash and params_to_array direct­ly from the class. Both take the same list of argu­ments, and only dif­fer on whether they return a hash ref­er­ence con­tain­ing named para­me­ters or an array ref­er­ence con­tain­ing posi­tion­al parameters.

There are options for slurp­ing extra passed val­ues into anoth­er hash buck­et and low­er­cas­ing named para­me­ters, and it will auto­mat­i­cal­ly chop off any lead­ing hyphens in your para­me­ter names. You can also alias mul­ti­ple named para­me­ters to the same result­ing argu­ment. The mod­ule does­n’t pro­vide any facil­i­ty for type val­i­da­tion, though.

Method::ParamValidator

This adds the inter­est­ing wrin­kle of being con­fig­urable with an exter­nal JSON file; oth­er­wise, it seems you have to call var­i­ous meth­ods on a val­ida­tor object to add para­me­ters (which it calls fields) or meth­ods to val­i­date. It does­n’t seem to sup­port slurp­ing extra val­ues nor posi­tion­al para­me­ters, but its type val­i­da­tion lets you use arbi­trary code ref­er­ences. The doc­u­men­ta­tion could use a bit of work with more exam­ples of real-​world usage rather than test script extracts. The author says it’s ​“just a pro­to­type,” though.

Mojolicious::Validator

The Mojolicious real-​time web frame­work has a built-​in val­ida­tor, but it’s geared towards val­i­dat­ing HTTP para­me­ters rather than sub­rou­tine argu­ments. There’s also a MojoX::Validator wrap­per for Input::Validator that per­forms much the same task. You could press either into ser­vice as sub­rou­tine val­ida­tors if you’re already using Mojolicious, but they aren’t struc­tured that way.

Return::Type

This isn’t for input para­me­ters to sub­rou­tines; rather, it pro­vides an attribute that spec­i­fies what type your sub­rou­tines return. As such, it’s com­pli­men­ta­ry to most of the oth­er tech­niques cov­ered in this series. It works with Type::Tiny, MooseX::Types, or MouseX::Types, and because Perl func­tions can tell whether they’re in scalar or list con­text, you can spec­i­fy dif­fer­ent type con­straints for each.

There are sev­er­al oth­er mod­ules with sim­i­lar func­tion­al­i­ty, but these are out­side the scope of this article.

routines

Based on Function::Parameters (cov­ered pre­vi­ous­ly), this prag­ma adds sup­port for a reg­istry for stor­ing Type::Tiny type libraries. It does­n’t appear to offer any oth­er sig­na­ture fea­tures, though. Feel free to cor­rect me in the comments.

As I said in my slide deck, maybe we’re tak­ing TMTOWTDI too far? It’s nice to be spoiled for options, though. I still rec­om­mend Type::Tiny​’s Type::Params for its per­for­mance and flex­i­bil­i­ty, or Params::ValidationCompiler if you’re using type libraries from Specio or Moose. Some use­ful side-​by-​side bench­marks would be nice; maybe I’ll save that for anoth­er arti­cle and fur­ther risk being labeled ​“the sig­na­tures guy.”