(You may never see this, being a late reply)

I totally understand what you want now. I guess it just needed some super-simplification :-)

No, there's nothing like that. What we need is a base class Bot.pm, perhaps even a factory, or a feature machine. It would take "plugins" that would each get a chance to "see" the input, and when one is happy, it would return the results, whatever that may be. Yes, interesting indeed.