The Best Practices tell us never to place two statements on the same line.
In general, I agree with this, and find it a workable thing to do. There’s a few cases I forget, or decide not to. In most of them, it comes back to bite me later, and I wish I’d listened.
At the end of the day, I like whitespace, so yes, use a new line.
The PBP suggests using spaces to indent all code lines, instead of hard tabs. The hard tab character should appear nowhere in a file.
I disagree with this, but have given up the argument and simply do it anyway. I feel it a minor loss, and not worth the confusion it causes from people who don’t understand hard tabs. (more…)
The PBP suggests using four space indentation levels.
The book goes into many reasons for this. It suggests that I’m an “ancient coding master” because I learned with eight columns, and find that a perfectly acceptable number. Cue; GET OFF MY LAWN! =) (more…)
The PBP suggests using a 78-column line length.
I’m good with this. I don’t feel the need to be a pedant about it, but I like the idea in general. (more…)
The suggestion is to put a comma after every value in a list, even the last which doesn’t need it. (more…)
The suggestion here is to place a semicolon after every statement. I agree with this, even if it isn’t technically needed. The only place I’ll skip it is if it is a function returning a constant value, and that’s all that is in the function, like this: (more…)
PBP says to put whitespace around binary operators. This, I entirely agree with. It also notes to keep unary operators together with their operand. This, too, I think is a good idea. (more…)
The PBP suggests putting whitespace between keys or indices and their brackets.
I find this a good suggestion, although I forget to do it sometimes. I do it for all complex statements, but forget for simple cases.
This is a place perltidy is a big help.
The suggestion in this section is not to use parenthesis for builtins and builtin-like functions.
I’m not sure why differentiating between builtins and functions is particularly useful, but I don’t object to the idea and found it easy to get used to.