Mastering Perl, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. Cleaning Up Perl

Part of mastering Perl is controlling the source code, no matter who gives it to you. People can usually read the code that they wrote, and usually complain about the code that other people wrote. In this chapter I’ll take that code and make it readable. This includes the output of so-called Perl obfuscators, which do much of their work by simply removing whitespace. You’re the programmer, and it’s the source, and you need to show it who’s boss.

Good Style

I’m not going to give any advice about code style, where to put the braces, or how many spaces to put where. These things are the sparks for heated debates that really do nothing to help you get work done. The perl interpreter doesn’t really care, nor does the computer. But, after all, we write code for people first and computers second.

Good code, in my mind, is something that a skilled practitioner can easily read. It’s important to note that good code is not something that just anyone could read. Code isn’t bad because a novice Perl programmer can’t read it, just like a novel isn’t bad because I don’t know the langauge. The first assumption has to be that the audience for any code is people who know the language, and if they don’t, know how to look up the parts they need to learn. Along with that, a good programmer should be able to easily deal with source written in the handful of major coding styles.

After that, consistency is a major part of good code. Not only should I try to do the same thing in ...