in reply to Re: Worst thing you ever made with Perl
in thread Worst thing you ever made with Perl

Significant whitespace?

Yes.

You're kidding, right?

No.

I thought I dodged that bullet when I quit trying to learn Python and stuck with Perl. 

print 3 . 5;  # 35
print 3.5;    # 3.5

%foo = (bar => "xyzzy")
print "-$foo{bar}-";   # -xyzzy-
print "-$foo {bar}-";  # - {bar}-

$a = 1;
print $a - -5;  # 6
print $a -- 5;  # error

print q qhelloq;  # hello
print qqhelloq;   # qqhelloq

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Etcetera, etcetera. Get used to it. Yes, POD has significant vertical whitespace.

Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }

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Re: Re: Re: Worst thing you ever made with Perl
by jonadab (Parson) on Sep 30, 2003 at 22:33 UTC 
    print 3 . 5;  # 35
print 3.5;    # 3.5

    [download]

    Warnings will catch that for you.

    %foo = (bar => "xyzzy")
print "-$foo{bar}-";   # -xyzzy-
print "-$foo {bar}-";  # - {bar}-

    [download]

    Putting a space in the middle of a variable is just a wee bit different from indenting lines within a function.

    $a = 1;
print $a - -5;  # 6
print $a -- 5;  # error

print q qhelloq;  # hello
print qqhelloq;   # qqhelloq

    [download]

    All of these examples are highly contrived, and not at all the same as wanting to indent lines to properly reflect a nested structure and being told that no, those lines should not be indented, because the leading whitespace is significant. And as for having blank lines be significant... the English language lacks the words to describe my view of that. At this point I'm thinking I'll probably continue to use comments as I have been doing, after all. The prospect of being able to automatically generate documentation from the POD comments embedded in the code was attractive to me in principle, but apparently it's not flexible enough to be used at all the way I want. 

    $;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/

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      Putting a space in the middle of a variable is just a wee bit different from indenting lines within a function.

      Is it? 

      %foo = (bar => "xyzzy")
print $foo{bar};       # xyzzy
print $foo {bar};      # xyzzy  (!!!)
print "-$foo{bar}-";   # -xyzzy-
print "-$foo {bar}-";  # - {bar}-

      [download]

      Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }

[reply]
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        Putting a space in the middle of a variable is just a wee bit different from indenting lines within a function.
        Is it?

        Yes, absolutely, without qualification, it is fundamentally different. Indenting everything within a block is a strongly-recommended best practice in good coding style, because it greatly enhances clarity. Being told that I shouldn't do that with POD is as far as I'm concerned a good enough reason in itself not to use POD (within blocks -- which is where I wanted to put the information in question), because I would have to adopt an unclear coding style in order to do so. Now I understand why people who use POD stick it all in big huge chunks, rather than interspersing it through the code like comments -- because fundamentally it's not designed to be interspersed the way comments can be. (I had been led to believe otherwise.)

        Putting whitespace in variable names (as, $foo {bar}) is something I would do in an obfuscation, to make the code *less* clear. If it alters the meaning, so what? It isn't something I'd normally expect good code to ever do, so at worst it's a very minor gotcha. 

        $;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/

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