Need your advice on how to start a program

[songahji]

Hi All,

There are many perl style programming out there. And since my next project going to be big and maintained by lots of diff guys. I would like your input on the styling which as less obfu as possible.

Following is what I have in mind:
As usual standard module.

use strict;
use warnings;
use English;  # This one ...? not sure

Also I use prefix $g_ on globals.

use vars qw {
  $g_var1
}

And POD at the end of file

__END__

=head1 NAME

...

=head1 SYNOPSIS

....

=head1 DESCRIPTION

....

=head1 SEE ALSO

....

=head1 COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2005 ...

......

=cut

I am open to all suggestions.

Thanks,
Hanny J

[polettix]

I like localising documentation, in particular I like to write documentation for a function immediately before the function itself. It helps when you have to figure out what it does, and when you make modifications you should also remember to update docs more easily.

[osunderdog]

I agree with this in theory, however in practice, interleaving code and pod comments messes up colorization in my favorite editor (emacs). I assume that it does in other editors as well. Do you have a work around or know of editors that don't exhibit this problem?

[naChoZ]

vim has no trouble with highlighting pod blocks. The (few) other editors I've tried didn't have a problem with it, komodo, anjuta, jedit, dzsoft, and a couple others.

[polettix]

Sorry to come back to this post only now, I thought I already answered this morning! I even added the emacs and cperl version as an update... on another post :)

The only problem I have with pod colorising in cperl is that it's quite slow to be triggered, but it works well for me. I'm running emacs 21.2.2 (Slackware 9 default) with the standard provided cperl.

[graff]

What version of emacs are you using? Colorizing POD works fine for me with emacs-21 on solaris and freebsd.

[adrianh]

Also I use prefix $g_ on globals.

I'd say that the more normal Perl convention would be to use the case of the variable name to indicate scope ($local, $Global, $CONSTANT).

And POD at the end of file...

You might be interested in the recommended templates from Damian's forthcoming "Perl Best Practices".

[songahji]

I like that $Global, $local and $CONSTANT variable name conventions. Where can I find the guidelines for normal Perl convention?

Thanks.

[Anonymous Monk]

See perldoc perlstyle

[tlm]

I don't see anything objectionable in what you propose. I did use English for a while, but I stopped when I realized that I found the code with the old cryptic globals more readable; a case of déformation professionelle, I suppose.

[ambrus]

Just a minor suggestion. It's better to import English like this:

use English "-no_match_vars";

see perldoc English on what that means.

[naChoZ]

There's some good discussion on the topic over at: Perl Style Guides for Large Projects

[songahji]

Thanks all of you. I have made the suggested changes.

Cheers,
Hanny J