My last big corporate gig involving COBOL (many years ago now) jumped on board the 'standard code' bandwagon. The company paid dearly for a tool that defined every single aspect of COBOL code. Unlike perltidy, however, this tool didn't reformat code, it only scanned it, then spit out a long list of deviations followed by a grade. Many, many meetings were held to discuss 'what' should be considered standard code (which varied from department to department), followed by more meetings about how the standard was going to be enforced within the company, and even more meetings about how to deal with legacy code (which not surprisingly, was eventually excluded from the standards). Standards committees created and standards reviewers positions were created to ensure that all work met minimum standards. Code reviews stopped being about whether the code actually worked the way it was supposed to, and instead became reviews about how to fix it so that it passed the minimum standard grade. After several years of this the overhead fell in on itself and the 'standards' grading system was scrapped in favour of common sense code reviews. If there had been a 'COBOLTIDY' back in the day instead of some style standards grader, a whole heap of work could have been avoided. Then again, anything to do with COBOL seems to be encumbered with a certain amount of pointlessness.

More recently I had a patch rejected from a project simply because it didn't pass an automated style checker (the code worked and tested as advertised).

What I like about (the idea of) perltidy is that even though it may not align with my personal coding style, it will at least bring everyone's style into a common melting pot, without enforcing it on anyone. So I as a coder am free to write in what ever form I'm comfortable with and pertidy can take care of making it readable to the rest of the population. I like to think my style is perfectly readable as is (or at least continually getting better with experience - I hope).

I'm considering running my personal pet projects through perltidy. Not because I necessarily believe in perltidy's definition of 'standard' (it's configurable right?), but if/when I start accepting code from other developers, I think I might like to have contributions automatically reformatted through perltidy. I think it would be counter productive to make other contributors jump through my style hoops.

Yikes! I'm flashbacking on COBOL. The heat must really be getting to me this week...