There's also PPI, which does a relatively good job of parsing Perl.

With PPI it should certainly be possible to identify and check that subset of your returns and function calls which take some regular, identifiable form. I'm not (yet) aware of existing code that already does this, but I could be missing something. Maybe one of the many Perl::Critic policies could provide a starting point...

use PPI; 
my $doc = PPI::Document->new( \<<'ENDPERL' );
sub foo { return 1, 2, 3 }
my ($x, $y, $z) = foo();
ENDPERL
use PPI::Dumper;
PPI::Dumper->new( $doc, whitespace=>0 )->print;
__END__
PPI::Document
  PPI::Statement::Sub
    PPI::Token::Word      'sub'
    PPI::Token::Word      'foo'
    PPI::Structure::Block      { ... }
      PPI::Statement::Break
        PPI::Token::Word      'return'
        PPI::Token::Number      '1'
        PPI::Token::Operator      ','
        PPI::Token::Number      '2'
        PPI::Token::Operator      ','
        PPI::Token::Number      '3'
  PPI::Statement::Variable
    PPI::Token::Word      'my'
    PPI::Structure::List      ( ... )
      PPI::Statement::Expression
        PPI::Token::Symbol      '$x'
        PPI::Token::Operator      ','
        PPI::Token::Symbol      '$y'
        PPI::Token::Operator      ','
        PPI::Token::Symbol      '$z'
    PPI::Token::Operator      '='
    PPI::Token::Word      'foo'
    PPI::Structure::List      ( ... )
    PPI::Token::Structure      ';'

[download]

In reply to Re: Checking number of values returned by Anonymous Monk
in thread Checking number of values returned by jfrm

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.