Declarative Exporting

The Exporter module has served Perl well over many years, but it's not without its flaws.

For a start, its interface is ungainly and hard to remember, which leads to unsanitary cutting and pasting. That interface also relies on subroutine names stored as strings in package variables. This design imposes all the inherent problems of using package variables, as well as the problems of symbolic references (see Chapters Chapter 5 and Chapter 11).

It's also redundant: you have to name each subroutine at least twice—once in its declaration and again in one (or more) of the export lists. And if those disadvantages weren't enough, there's also the ever-present risk of not successfully naming a particular subroutine twice, by misspelling it in one of the export lists.