Introducing Kavorka

Kavorka is a function signatures module, along the lines of Function::Parameters, Method::Signatures, and MooseX::Method::Signatures.

Its features include:

  • Named, positional and slurpy parameters
  • Required and optional parameters
  • Defaults for optional parameters
  • Type constraints and value constraints
  • Type coercions
  • Return types
  • Method modifiers
  • Multi subs and multi methods
  • Lexical (private) methods
  • An introspection API that can integrate with Moose's MOP
  • Speed

It probably has every feature you want from in a function signatures module, unless you want minimalism.

Here's how you might write a function with type checks on the incoming parameters and also the returned value:

   fun maxnum (Num @numbers → Num) {
      my $max = shift @numbers;
      for (@numbers) {
         $max = $_ if $max < $_;
      }
      return $max;
   }

Kavorka is still not especially stable, but seems to work pretty well (except in some cases defining closures over variables outside the sub).

Feedback welcome.

2 Comments

While you are pointing to the other modules, to the casual observer it isn't obvious what the real advantages are to this module over the existing solutions.

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About Toby Inkster

user-pic I'm tobyink on CPAN, IRC and PerlMonks.