Various responses:

I haven't tried with perl tidy, I need to check into that, thanks. I agree with the indentation being part of core emacs and finding syntax errors through odd indentation is helpful! I'd rather have the feature in cperl vs using the perl tidy piping approach too.

I'm much more familiar with perl vs python, but that's interesting there's also the lisp for python programmers document.

In the past I've actually learned some LISP and also Emacs LISP but have forgotten it. Trying to figure out how to add in the additional bit of indentation features would be an interesting side project and make me pretty happy as the end result hehe