Re: CPAN's perltidy to the rescue!

[davido]

in reply to CPAN's perltidy to the rescue!

I agree. I think perltidy is great. (That's perltidy for the search-impared).

I feel more productive when I keep my code formatted reasonably well as I'm working with it. But before significant commits (especially ones that will get merged back into a more stable branch), I usually pass it through perltidy first (This works out best if everyone plays by the same rules, or else your 'git diff' becomes a log of all the changes perltidy made, and the potential for merge rejects increases). Often when I compare what I thought was reasonable formatting with what perltidy comes up with, I have to agree with its assessment. But there's a consistent issue that always bugged me. It has to do with how it chooses to indent a qw// list (by default). Here's a contrived example:

# How I like to see it.
my @stuff = qw(  some  big     list  
                 of    items   that 
                 spans several rows  );


# How perltidy likes to see it.
my @stuff = qw(  some  big     list
  of    items   that
  spans several rows  );

Finally it annoyed me enough that I dug into the docs and discovered the -ntqw command line switch. Much happier now. :)

[Riales]

That's the sort of thing nobody can agree on; here's how I like to see it:

my @stuff = qw/
    some  big     list
    of    items   that
    spans several rows
/;

It's really awesome that perltidy lets you customize all that!