note Anonymous Monk <p>While I cannot see the changes you made in your example (a problem with node formatting), the answer is yes, you can use whitespace. In fact, <em>please</em> add (a reasonable amount of) whitespace. Separate any logical blocks of code you have with an extra linebreak. I generally sprinkle one after (a group of) variable declarations, too. (But I hate "double-spaced" code.)</p> <p>Also, use tabs to indent your code. Configure your editor to show them as n spaces, where n is a comfortable value (for you). I generally use a value of two spaces, but whenever I'm reading code I'm unfamiliar with, I'll increase it temporarily to four. It helps me understand the flow better.</p> <p>You might also like the <c>/x</c> modifier if you're working with regular expressions. And if you don't have a syntax-colouring editor yet, get one immediately! It will help tremendously.</p> <p>Here's what my code looks like, to give you a rough idea on what I consider OK spacing:</p> <code> sub lint { my ($fn) = $_; $fn = decode_utf8($fn); if ($fn ne (my $new_fn = compose($fn))) { print STDERR "Decomposed unicode: $new_fn\n"; if (!DRY_RUN) { die if -e $new_fn; rename($fn, $new_fn) or warn "Failed rename for file $fn"; } } if (-f $fn) { </code> 996700 996700 6