Monks,

One of the advantages I think Perl has over Pyt^W^W^W other comparable languages is that whitespace is insignificant. Perl takes away the thought barriers to creating code, allowing you to solve problems without the language getting in your way.

Although whitespace is insignificant to perl itself, whitespace can be significant to Perl programmers. Take the following example:

# print out 4

print 2+2;

[download]

vs.

# print out 4
print 2+2;

[download]

vs.

#   print out 4


print 2 + 2;

[download]

What do you do if you have engineers on a project who each prefer a different style? My solution has been to just go with the flow and not change anything, so that development time is spent writing code, and not on whitespace semantics. But I know that isn't always the case, some developers can have strong opinions.

What approaches have you found work well here?

UPDATE - just got downmodded 1, I guess some people do have strong opinions! :)

UPDATE - we are using all sorts of code control mechanisms, including perltidy, this is more of a question regarding how do you handle differing opinions the issues that aren't caught by the code control mechanisms.

In reply to Whitespace and perl developers by redhotpenguin

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