I thought of that, but if you are taking it line-by-line (rather than whole post), any program of more than a few lines will have plenty of lines that compile.

$var="bob";
[download]

I played around with the idea a bit yesterday night (the nights are really hot this time in .de :)), and here's a prototype that does some good formatting on my coding style. I don't know how well it works for other coding styles, and the implementation is a bit crude ... I couldn't get your elegant idea of "most single lines should compile" to work for me, so I resorted mostly to static REs - quite unelegant, as any such list is bound to be incomplete ...

Anyway, if anybody wants to have a look at how a heuristic markup could be done, here's the code (the code is still a bit confused about CODE and PRE tags, but you should get the intention ...) :

Update :D'oh - as soon as I go offline, I see many problems with the code. So here's an updated version ... Hmm - and I follow the suggestion and put the code into the Code Catacombs instead of posting it here ... The Code

This is nice, but don't you think it really belongs in the Code Catacombs?

The Perl Gods have said that the Perl interpreter is the best way to interpret Perl, so I'm still thinking that something that works with that would work better. After some testing though, I've discovered that the Safe Module will not do what I wanted. What we really need is the perl -c command function. I know nothing about the guts of perl, but there should be someway to access this. Do any of the Perl Gods have ideas?