It is also an attempt to improve the vertical alignment of similar elements, thus trying to *draw* vertical ideal lines enforcing the code structure not just with identation spaces, by also with meaningful characters (similar to the $ % @ & perl characters in front of identifiers).

Please, look at this simplification of code:

"Evil" style
; _________
   { ____ ( ___
          , __
          , ___
          )
   ; _____
   ; ___
   }


More conventional style
_________ {
    ____ ( ___,
           __,
           ___ );
    _____;
    ___;
}
[download]

Looking at the "Evil" style you will have brackets and semicolons of the same block, always *drawing* a vertical line; same thing for the parens and commas in a list. This make it harder to leave some element out, while the conventional style (being far less vertical aligned), leaves me too freedom to forget something.

The only drawback is that the "Evil" style it is too unconventional to be used in the examples of my PODs :-(

Domizio Demichelis

Howdy!

There is a "middle" ground...

_________
{
    ____ ( ___,
           __,
           ___,
         );
    _____;
    ___;
}
[download]

One can (righteously) align paired parens/braces in the vertical axis without using the radical approach of leading off with punctuation.

yours,
Michael

I think the real problem is beginning with semicolons. Sure, you *can*, but it gives the (false) impression that a semicolon is a statement beginner when it's really a statement terminator. I'm sure it's just a minor stylistic quibble anyways, but I prefer my syntax elements to visually look like what they really do, which in this case is ending statements.

Beginning with semi-colons is also evil because the semi-colon is used to denote the beginning of a comment in some environments. Certainly if I were to see something like:

; use strict
; use warnings
; use other_stuff
[download]

I would think "why is he commenting all those out?"

I think the real problem is beginning with semicolons. Sure, you *can*, but it gives the (false) impression that a semicolon is a statement beginner when it's really a statement terminator.

Well, since this is a well formed block made of 3 'statements':

    { A ; B ; C }
[download]

I would say that perl uses semicolon to divide/split statements, more as a 'statement separator' than 'statement end' (i.e. neither to end nor to start statements).

I agree that putting the semicolon at the end is the more popular convention, (and for this reason my style is unconventional), but these are exactly the same block, just splitted after or before the 'statement separator':

    { A ;
      B ; 
      C 
    } 

    { A
    ; B
    ; C
    }
[download]

the advantage of the latter is the vertical alignment, its disadvantage is that it is unconventional.

Domizio Demichelis