Dallaylaen:

I agree that compact and readable are worthwhile goals. I also agree that the third goal you alluded to (but didn't state) is worthwhile--unsurprising. Until you actually build some larger cases yourself, though, it'll be a bit difficult to judge which approach best meets your goals.

I often hit the same snag and try to 'optimize' those goals before I'm ready. My suggestion would be to do one of:

• Add a TODO comment to your code with your current question and postpone it for now
• Build all three of them, with a large enough example to see if any of them are obviously better

Presenting the issue to us is a good idea, too, as someone may have a good suggestion, but in this case, I think I'd more fully show your alternatives so that we don't have to dream up our own test cases. The problem with letting us come up with our own internalized test cases is that it's too easy to miss cases when you're thinking of test cases rather than writing them down as an example. So working up your own examples may make it rather more obvious to you what the better approach would be. (Kinda like the debugging technique "Rubber Duck Debugging"² "Talking to the Teddy Bear" (or whatever it was, I forget what the standard name for it is).)

Anyway, while typing this up I had the thought (dunno if it would be useful or not, or even work¹) of using a quoted regex for the first get parameter (i.e., let perl do the heavy lifting), and then you could possibly let the named parameters come free from perls regex handler:

get qr/(?<greet>hi|hello)/ => sub {
    print $+{greet}, " there!\n";
}
[download]

Update: Added note below (and marker above).

Note 1: I haven't used named captures very often ... often enough to know they exist, but infrequently enough that I'm always having to read the documentation on them and give it a few tries before I can use with without tripping over the syntax...

Note 2: Fixed debugging method name, thanks pryrt!

Note 3: I'm off work today, and I got curious whether I could make it work or not, so I gave it a try:

$ cat pm_1198334.pl
#!env perl

my @handlers;
sub get {
    my ($key, $action) = @_;
    push @handlers, [ $key, $action ];
}

sub handle {
    my $request = shift;

    for my $rh (@handlers) {
        my ($key, $action) = @$rh;

        if ("Regexp" eq ref $key) {
            return $action->($request) if $request =~ $key;
        }
        elsif ("" eq ref $key) {
            return $action->($request) if $key eq $request;
        }
        else {
            print "How do I handle <", ref($key), ">?\n";
        }
    }

    print "Sorry, I don't know what <$request> means!\n";
}

get foo => sub { print "Pizza time!\n" };
get qr/(?<greet>hi|hello)/ => sub { print $+{greet}, " there!\n" };

handle("foo");
handle("hi robot!");
handle("helloooooooo Nurse!");

Roboticus@Waubli ~
$ perl pm_1198334.pl
Pizza time!
hi there!
hello there!
[download]

Success!

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.