Coding Standards

How To Change This Document And Our Style

• Non-policy changes, typos, wording, formatting and such, can be done by anyone.
• Policy changes should be submitted as an issue.
• Changes to .perlcritic and .perltidy can be done as pull requests.
• Not sure what to do or what something means? Ask.

Checking and Correcting Style

• Anyone can correct the code to better match style.
• Syntax style is codified in .perltidy.
• As much coding style as possible is codified in .perlcritic
• Running ./Build tidy and ./Build critic will run perltidy and perlcritic respectively.

Testing

• t/00_TEST_TEMPLATE.t is a template for writing tests. Copy it to make new test files.
• Tests should use Test::Most, with no test count specified.
• Tests should use perl5i::latest, not perl5i::2. This will make creating a new major version easier.
• Tests should have a #! line.
• Each test file should test a single method or group of related methods, or a single, complicated bug.
• Tests which require complicated set up should go in their own test file.
• Sets of related test files should go into a sub-directory.
• perl5i specific testing libraries should go into t/lib

Coding

• Error is indicated not by returning false, but by throwing an exception.
• The documentation does not have a version number, for example lib/perl5i.pm and lib/perl5i/Meta.pod.
• The code has a major version, for example lib/perl5i/2.pm and lib/perl5i/2/HASH.pm.