Parameter Pattern Matching in Perl

[withering]

Hello fellow monks.

A few days ago I was working on type inference in both simply-typed lambda calculus and Hindley-Milner System. While I was trying to use hashtables to implement branches for getting rid of annoying 'if's, I realized that there's no quick ways to emulate pattern matching in ML or Haskell -- It is a fact that we could not easily do that due to the dynamic nature of Perl's type system. However, I managed to emulate some of the features I used in Erlang, ML, or perhaps Haskell and made a small CPAN module HOI::Match (where HOI means Higher-Order Imperative):

HOI::Match

With the module, I am able to write such a sum function:

sub sum {
    HOI::Match::pmatch(
        "h :: r" => sub { my %args = @_; $args{h} + sum($args{r}) },
        "nil" => sub { 0 }
    )->(@_)
}

(Note that the arguments in @_ may be FETCH several times so it is dangerous to rely on side effects of FETCH on arguments.)

Any suggestion or criticism is welcomed. I am looking forward for your replies.