A Matter of Style

[Anonymous Monk]

Greeting, fellow monks, I happen to start my modules like this:

use 5.010;
use strict;
use warnings;

package Foo::Bar;

use Data::Dumper;
use IO::Handle;
...

since AFAIK, pragmas extend to the end of the file, while a file may contain multiple packages (which mine do, sometimes). So, most modules in the standard Perl distribution put the "package" on top. I know this is not a big issue, both syntactically and semantically, but still I would like to know your opionion about the "right" style to start a Perl package...

[choroba]

Searching for package strict returns, among others, order of strict and package, which is almost identical with your question.

[Anonymous Monk]

Thank you very much, I guess I should have done my homework.

[tobyink]

If you brace your packages, a la:

{
   package Foo::Bar;
   use strict;
   ...;
}

package Foo::Bar; {
   use strict;
   ...;
}

# Perl 5.14+
package Foo::Bar {
   use strict;
   ...;
}

... then it makes a difference, because lexically scoped pragma such as strict will end with the closing brace.

If you put multiple packages in the same file, then there are good arguments in favour of bracing each package - to prevent, e.g. leakage of our variables.

[Anonymous Monk]

The number-one rule of Good Style is: consistency. Pick a way of saying it, make sure that it says what you think it does, and do it exactly the same way every time within a project.