in reply to A question of style.

Check out perltidy. It'll reformat overall pretty well, as well as being able to do some cleanup of things like extra parens and the like. I have a ~/.perltidy file with these settings and it manages to get most code into a format close enough to what I usually write:

-l=76 -i=2 -ce -lp -nasc -icp

Once you've got things more readable you can start refactoring to get the code itself more perl-esque.