Obviously there isn't ever gonna be a 100% solution for a language as dynamic as Perl. Even if you had some kind of internal reflection capability at runtime, you can't account for an AUTOLOAD that hasn't been run yet. And for textual parsing you can't find dynamically created methods and attributes.

In PerlySense I take a heuristic approach to identifying methods.(And I don't distinguish between methods and attributes.)

Basically, Perl code has a lot of conventions and idioms. If it looks like Perl, let's assume it is Perl. So if you look at Perl code and see this, what would you say it looks like?

$self->send_email();
[download]

It looks like a method on the class for the current package. So let's assume that's what it is. In the same vein I take the shortcut of considering this a method/accessor:

$self->{email} = $recipient_email;
[download]

If PerlySense can't find an explicit declaration for a sub or attribute (mostly attributes), it will look for matching POD to display or navigate to.

How you interpret things kinda depends on whether you consider false positives or false negatives worse. Maybe some positives are worse in some situations and negatives worse in others (possibly completions vs refactorings). Just looking at methods invoked on $self is not gonna find all of them, but static parsing of "sub" + $self->method and $self->{attribute} turns out to be pretty complete.

When it comes to static parsing of syntax, I guess we'll need to write plugins to accompany module-introduced syntax for Moose, Class::Accessor, Class::MethodMaker, etc.

I haven't done anything like that yet, but there's enough Moose classes in the code base at work that I'm really starting to miss a working "Go to Base Class" for the Moose stuff.

/J