[sf-perl] IDEs and/or Editors

[Joe Brenner]

Michael Friedman <friedman at highwire.stanford.edu> wrote:

> Andy Lester wrote:

> > For me, vim's color coding is part of everything I do.  If I do
> > anything wrong, it just feels wrong.  For example, if I close a quote
> > incorrectly, the rest of my code is purple.  Even if I can't tell
> > exactly what's wrong, I just FEEL that there's a problem, and I stop
> > until I figure it out.
> 
> I use syntax coloring for the same reason. 

I've gotten used to emacs' syntax coloring of late, and I suppose it
does help me fix some errors sooner... for example, I like to intermix
pod and code (contra-Conway), but pod has some annoying white-space
sensitivity to it (you're supposed to bracket pod tags with *empty*
lines, not just blank ones).  Syntax highlighting helps a lot with this:
I don't often run podchecker any more.

On the other hand, there's a suprising number of cases where I don't 
get what the syntax coloring is trying to tell me until after I figure
it out ("Oh, *duh* that's a reserved word...").

I do find that emacs' auto-indentation features often highlight simple 
syntax problems (dropped semi-colons, etc)...

> However, I'm now a big fan of perltidy, which automatically "fixes"
> any location-of-code errors I make accidentally. Between the two, it
> lets me both catch problems more quickly and understand someone else's
> code more easily.

perltidy essentially performs the same job as the emacs/cperl-mode 
indent features.

> To me, integrated perltidy support is a Required Feature of any Perl IDE.

I don't think the need is as great in the emacs world, but there 
are methods of doing anything like this you might imagine...

Heh, just stumbled across a new "perltidy-mode":

  http://search.cpan.org/dist/perltidy-mode/

This guy is doing some interesting stuff...

  http://use.perl.org/~jjore/journal/30321