I know both smls and BrowserUK will disapprove with using whatever slang, but without slang, there will be some amongst us that would never use the language because of the missing freedom.

The funny thing is, I think I'm almost (but only almost) as wedded to my preferred style as you are to yours. As far a Perl6 is concerned, I'm either 'lucky' (or I've arrived at my chosen style by dint of experience and going with what works), because from what I've seen, Perl6 requires spaces pretty much everywhere I would put them anyway; and prohibits them where I wouldn't put them.

Indeed, a big part of why I've steered clear of offering patches to perl5 itself, is because I find the prevailing 'style' of the sources -- especially when combined with the hotch potch of mixed styles of later additions and amendments -- almost completely unintelligible. On those occasions when I go source diving to try resolve or understand some problem, I end up reformatting whole tranches of sources to 'correct' for the whole "let's randomly skip a level of indent or two just in case there is someone out there who is still using an AMD-3a with its 64 character line width; and other such idiocies; I'm constantly annoyed by macros that have to be called as procedures instead of functions (instead of this: MYTYPE *p = (MYTYPE*)malloc( 1024 ); you have to use:

MYTYPE *p;
...
...
...
Newxc( p, 1024, MYTYPE, (MYTYPE*));
[download]

Which is just asinine.

But I am in the position of being mostly retired. I only take work I'm interested in; only by referral, and turn down more than I take.

But if I were you, I'd be very wary of becoming so wedded to your stylistic preferences that you're unprepared to compromise them.

Were you to come to me as a prospective employee, laying down the law that you couldn't possibly use the language I've chosen for my project, because it compromises your stylistic freedoms; and I don't think it would be a very long conversation.