Re: Why is perltidy using indent-columns instead of continuation-indentation when breaking up a long if-line?

[karlgoethebier]

If i were in your shoes i wouldn‘t waste my time with questions like this.

And BTW: Did you try to format the code by hand and then run perltidy on the buffer/file?

Big surprise! O.K. - sometimes...

Best regards, Karl

[Tux]

I can come up with many reasons why you want to put time and effort into this!

For the purpose of the this discussion, let us assume I have taken over the module the OP wrote years ago, and for good reason, he/she put up for grabs (no more interest in Perl, no more access to required resources, left life, ...).

Now, for obvious reasons, I do *not* like the style/layout of the code this module was (consistently) written in, and - also for this discussion - the module has thousands of lines of code.

I think that code needs to be easy to *read* in order to be able to maintain it properly, so next to *consistent* indentation and styling, it needs to be beautiful and that is where perltidy drops in place.

Whatever style the module's code was written in, I run perltidy with *my* preferences, and suddenly all the code looks beautiful, so I can understand it. Next step is to edit all the code by hand and make the last mis-formats match my own style. As no software is perfect, there will be parts that are not formatted according taste.

By browsing/editing the codebase, I now get acquainted by the code's structure and main parts and I can start focusing on open issues and bugs.

By having a .perltidyrc file that formats the code to as close as possible what you think is best (and we will not agree there), you will save yourself a lot of time later on.

[torgny]

> If i were in your shoes i wouldn‘t waste my time with questions like this.

I am not sure what you mean when you say questions like this. Is my question not appropriate for perlmonks?

> And BTW: Did you try to format the code by hand and then run perltidy on the buffer/file?

Yes. I did and the result was that perltidy disagreed with me and increased my two spaces to four.

[haukex]

Is my question not appropriate for perlmonks?

Your question is very appropriate for PerlMonks - the way I interpreted karlgoethebier's point was "don't worry too much about things that are too difficult to change" ;-) Although I do think it's worth it to investigate a bit how difficult it is to change this behavior. Personally I agree with LanX, I tend to format my own code by hand or via the editor's built-in tools and to leave perltidy for cleaning up code I get from elsewhere. But if you want to run perltidy on everything that's fine too, although AFAIK not every bit of its behavior is configurable.

Edit: Typos.