Two possibilities:

1. Calculate them.

   There is a worked example, in MATLAB, on the wikipedia page of the guy that worked out how to do it: Arthur_Thomas_Doodson. It should be relatively easy to adapt it to perl, though you need sets of values for each place you want to make predictions for. These are probably available on line somewhere.

2. Download them from an existing on-line source.

   For example, the UK Hydrological Office makes 7 days worth of predictions available for 100s of points around the world for free.

   There are almost certainly other sites that do similar.

In general tide calculations are horribly complicated because they are not only influenced by obvious things like the phase of the moon, but also by the topography of the sea floor in the "local" area. For accurate tide predictions for a specific location you need to obtain coefficients for the set of significant parameters used in a tidal model (maybe 30-60 of them!). The parameters are generally calculated from tide data collected over a longish period (19 years) for the location of interest! See Theory_of_tides#Tidal_constituents for a discussion of some of these parameters.

Writing a Perl module to perform the required calculations would not be particularly hard, but the result is likely to be slow. Obtaining the coefficients is likely to be a harder problem than writing the code to perform the calculation.

In general tide calculations are horribly complicated

YES, this is what make a project like this so dificult and thus so "sexy". A very unusual problem here in the monastery.

but also by the topography of the sea floor in the "local" area

yep ...and don't forget the barometric pressure. The local parameters are important.

A lot of parameters should be in any of the modules managing time/localtime, other groups in modules belonging to Math and Astro categories, and a fourth set should be calculated for the specific area and probably need to be measured in the field. If I could make a wish I will add also a plotting method at the end, (maybe Graphics::Timeline or something equivalent).

Writing a Perl module to perform the required calculations would not be particularly hard

I agree

but the result is likely to be slow

Well this is an advice that I will take seriously. Can I abuse of your time and knowledge and ask you to explore this a little more GrandFather?, do you honestly think that this would be a major obstacle to do this in Perl? (instead i.e. C). Generally speaking of course, how this problem could be avoided? (i.e not choosing a time-module know for being slow etc...)

Well, I have about 500 lines of C that uses a 37 coefficient set to perform tide prediction calculations but it's not code I can release to the public domain (I don't have ownership of it) and I'm not sure I could legally derive a Perl equivalent from it. However, it's pretty much solid calculation so the equivalent Perl wouldn't be a heck of a lot smaller. You can gauge from that the size of the coding task. Oh, and I don't know how compatible that set of parameters may be with publicly available tide parameter sets so the whole thing could be a complete waste of time in any case.

To be of any practical use a tide calculation module would need to use a set of parameters for which data is publicly available. It's about 10 years since I worked on any of this stuff so maybe things are different now, but then the data was considered valuable and was hard to come by. Because of the potential difficulty in getting data I'd think there would be little call for such a module in CPAN. My involvement in such calculations has long since passed so I have no particular current interest in creating such a module.

True laziness is hard work

http://tidesonline.nos.noaa.gov/

Just look at Tide calculation on Wikipedia, you can implement that in Perl (if that's what you want; if not, please elaborate).

mmmh, you really have my interest, please elaborate the idea. Of course is possible and you'll probably want:

use strict; use warnings;

use Astro::MoonPhase;
use Math::Trig; # you will need the cosine function

# print cos X ; # where X in radians;

my $date = time();
my @dataphase = phase($date);

print "Distance to the Moon at this day: ", $dataphase[3], " Km";
[download]

I am looking for a way to get the ocean tides using Perl.

No, sea and bits do not mix

Has anyone done or would know if its possible using Perl.

If you can build a tide machine, you can talk to it with perl