When I'm passing many arguments to a sub I often bundle them up into a hash ref and pass that. Similarly, if the sub returns many arguments I pass them back in a hash ref too. One advantage of using a hash (i.e. named arguments) in such cases is that you're not relying on the position of the arguments. With many arguments that can start to get tricky. Building hashes also let me easily introduce lots of vertical white space. While some monks pour scorn on such a style I find it reads better. So there! :-)

If your dates and scores are in an AoH you can let Perl load them into a couple of tmp vars and print those rather than a long list of indexed array elements. To my eyes it looks neater and, with well chosen var names, can be self documenting.

When you're dealing with complex data structures and you're struggling to disentangle them it's worth having a look at Data::Dumper to work out what is happening.

Untested and doesn't compile.

my $args = {
  balance_sheets  => \@balancesheets,
  cashflows       => \@cashflows,
  pnl             => \@pn1,
  # etc.
  # etc.
};

my $F = piotroski($args);

my (@dates, @scores);
push @dates,  $F->{date}[$_]{$co_name}  for (0..4);
push @scores, $F->{score}[$_]{$co_name} for (0..4);

print join(qq{\t}, @dates), qq{\n};
print join(qq{\t}, @scores);

sub piotroski {
  my $args = shift;
  #
  # do something with args
  #
  my $F = {
    date      => $date_ref,
    score     => $F_SCORE_ref,
    score_box => $F_SCORE_BOX_ref,
    roa       => $F_ROA_ref,
    # etc.
    # etc.
  }
  
  return $F;
  
}
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updated: fixed key name typo

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