I started programming in the laguage famous for ruining peoples style - basic. After some years ripping out code in QuickBasic I cam to the conclusion that it wasn't ruining my style, as my snotty C coder friends would frequently comment.

It was improving my style.

In the free form languages you can be astoundingly sloppy. But when you start churning out a few hundred lines of code you rapidly realise that if your style sucks, you won't even be able to finish your program. It will be too large and confusing. If you are sloppy, it will never work. If you discipline yourself, you can write huge programs in basic.

So to your problem - you can do anything with perl, but you can prevent yourself from achieving your goal. Clearly you realise this but your other coders don't. Have you tried explaining what could go wrong if they continue their bad habits?

In a team collective discipline is all important. You may not be able to convince them to work together, but perhaps you can head off the worse abuses by pointing out how they could torpedo the program with really bad practises.

If you don't know why the gurus do things, it is fine to ask. Most people here are ready to debate the finer points of just about any technique.

Finally some people just don't learn until they've done it the hard way. You can talk to them until you are blue in the face, but they won't change without the personal experience. I still encourage the people I work with to program correctly, but there will always be someone who insists that he doesn't need to comment his code at all because it is self-documenting, or that he doesn't need taint checking because his code is so good, or...

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.