It's not that I'm well-versed in many template systems because it has been a while since I looked at them all, but just going with the one I use the most, HTML::Template, for a second, I remember a method like this. Unfortunately, it scares me too much. It says that you can associate an object that has a param method like its own, one behaviour of which is to list all the parameters it has. And my dynamic method may accept hundreds or thousands of parameters, and looking them up is exactly the overhead I was trying to avoid.

If HTML::Template said that it only needed the aspect of param which is to retrieve the value, that would be perfect. Even if that's all the code does (I've not checked), I would not feel comfortable about it until the docs were updated to give me some sense of security about the long-term stability of the requirement.

Are the other templates out there doing something less invasive? I understand that this was intended to allow you to put your CGI object directly into the template to fasttrack some parameters, so the desire to change it would be quite low by the developers.