On Fri, Sep 28, 2001 at 04:11:35PM -0400, John Porter wrote:
> > On Fri 28 Sep 2001 01:37, "Abigail" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > >        my $aref = [
> > >             [qw /fred   barney pebbles bambam dino/],
> > >             [qw /homer  bart   marge   maggie/     ],
> > >             [qw /george jane   elroy   judy/       ],
> > >        ];
> 
> I'd prefer to see (and I certainly would write)
> 
>         [qw( homer  bart   marge   maggie     )],
> 
> As a vi user, it gives me an excuse to bounce on the % key.
> I also don't understand why one would squeeze out all the
> whitespace from inside the delimiters, when in general it's
> more useful inside than out.  Can someone splain this to me?


I fail to understand what you mean by "whitespace being more useful
from inside the delimiters". 

As for where to place whitespace in the neighbourhood of punctuation,
I generally put no whitespace before punctuation that "closes" or "ends"
something (like periods and questionmarks in English, or semicolons and
closing parens in code), but there should be whitespace following it.
OTOH, punctuation that "opens" or "begins" something, like left parens,
the first of a pair of quotes, and sigils have whitespace before them,
and no whitespace following it. Other punctuation acts like separators
(like binary operators), they get whitespace on either side.

Exceptions to the above cases happen when syntax demands it, when lining
up things vertically is preferred, or in some idiomatic cases (I generally
don't put whitespace between the `s', `m', `y' or `tr' and the punctuation
that follows - but I do with `qq', `q', `qw', `qx' and `qr').


Abigail

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