my $text = <<'    EOT'

Which part of "Adding the indent spaces to the end marker means code stops working if it changes, which is VERY bad." do you not understand? I'm not sure you even misunderstand it, because you repeat it: "It still has the drawback that if ...".

Suppose you add 8 spaces to the end marker because it is indented by two levels. But you decide to loop over this code. You add a while (EXPR) { and a }, and being the smart programmer that you are, you indent the block immediately using the easy feature your favourite editor has for doing so. Oops, you just broke the code by changing indentation! Unless you add another 4 spaces to the end marker, your code no longer works.

I prefer series of concatenations or repeated print statements to error prone sugar.

As for removing whitespace from the beginning: I usually output HTML and do not care.

Juerd
- http://juerd.nl/
- spamcollector_perlmonks@juerd.nl (do not use).