Ugh, please don't do that. It's brittle to maintain, hard to document, confusing to explain, and I've never seen a case where it really simplifies things.

If you really need to export a simple procedural interface, create an object and export curried functions that use the object to call the methods.

chromatic,
While I tend to agree that having single functions that works as a method and an exportable function is usually a bad idea, your solution seems a bit over the OP's head. Would you mind providing a code sample, point to an existing wheel, or link to some documentation that does a better job explaining.

For what it is worth - I really like that Perl6 will distinguish between methods and subs as well as provide multi-method dispatch.

Cheers - L~R

It could be as simple as:

use vars '@EXPORT';

@EXPORT = qw( list of methods to curry );

sub import
{
    my $class          = shift;
    my $curried_object = $class->new();
    my $caller         = caller();

    for my $export ( @EXPORT )
    {
        *{ $caller . "::$export" } = sub { $curried_object->$export( @
+_ ) };
    }
}
[download]

Just to document an adaptation on Cody's approach, that I´ve just tested with success:

Instead of

sub half {
  my $number; 
  if (ref($_[0]) eq 'MyPackage') {
      my $self   = shift();
      $number = shift();
   } else {
       $number = shift();
   }
   return $number / 2;
}
[download]

We can make the adaptation of all perl4-ish functions possible just by adding a single line, on the top of each function's code:

sub half {

  if (ref($_[0]) =~ /MyPackage/ ) { my $self = shift; } 

# as the former Perl4-like functions don´t need the $self object, this
+ line's role is to clean up the first element of the @_ array! And, s
+o, make things ready for the shifts your code already is set to!
  
  my $number = shift;
  
  return $number / 2;
  
}
[download]

Detail: I call all my methods libraries MyPackage, Mypackage2 etc, so by testing with this regexp, I don't even have to worry to adapt this one-line according to the library I´m converting into module! Just adding it all over the subs, and finally enter the OO world!

sub half {
  my $number; 
  if (ref $_[0] eq __PACKAGE__) {
      my ( $self, $number ) = @_;
   } 
   # uncuddles elses are faster!
   else {
       $number = $_[0];
   }
   return $number / 2;
}
[download]

sub half {
  my $number; 
  if (ref $_[0]) {
      my ( $self, $number ) = @_;
   } 
   # uncuddles elses are faster!
   else {
       $number = $_[0];
   }
   return $number / 2;
}
[download]

# uncuddles elses are faster!

What? Is that really true? I thought it was just a style choice...

No, really, have you tried it with Benchmark?