The perl Template::Toolkit is very rich, but its "function" support is a
bit poor. The ways to do it are either via MACRO directives, or by
simulating them with one function per file and then using PROCESS on
these. The problem is that this is very clunky, does not support
nesting, as we'd need different "argument" names for each "function",
and it's quite cumbersome to use, need to assign aguments passed
beforehand, and then assign back a designated return value from another
variable. This is also one of the reasons some of the functions are not
encapsulated, and have been inlined in various loops, because it was not
possible to cleanly PROCESS them from those call sites.
Instead we should use its native support for perl objects and perl
subroutines, which exposes these as proper methods of a designated
variable, and have none of the above mentioned problems. So we'll switch
from constructs such as:
argv.arg-a = variable;
argv.arg-b = 'value';
PROCESS 'path-to-library-dir/function'
result = out
into:
result = ngcp.function(variable, 'value');
In addition this might actually be faster, as it does not require
processing additional files, and it's all just native perl code.
This will be exposed within the NGCP templates as the ngcp object, and
new member functions will start replacing our old and clunky native
Template PROCESS-style library.
Change-Id: Id2f0d181c695a9dd074646881b7d9de3478570af
Guillem Jover