Please don't take this as a criticism, but how long have you been programming? I'm asking because I used to have an opinion like this when I was just starting, but after a few years I realized that changing all of the code as the first thing is one of the worst things to do.
For pay since 2005. Do keep in mind that the code i am working with usually has some sort of test suite available, and that over time i have become very good at transforming code between different forms of expression without changing the effects it causes. (Excluding memory use and performance, which is not something one usually has to consider much in Perl.)
Ah, so long enough for the advice to be based on real experience.
I was really surprised to see it, because it's exactly the way I was learning C. I switched to Linux around the same time, so I'd take some abandoned DOS program that had source code available and port it to Linux. During the process, I'd read the entire source code, make sure I understood it and reformatted everything. A few years later, the original author of one of the programs released a new version and thanks to my reformatting, it was pretty much impossible to merge. After a few similar experiences at work, I have decided to always stick with the original style of any code I touch, because any unnecessary changes are just going to make life harder for me in the future.
1. Perl is MUCH more concise than C, since we have institutionalized code sharing (see CPAN), whereas most C devs i know (and maybe i don't know too good ones) seem to at most reuse code others wrote by way of ctrl+c/ctrl+v.
2. Perl's reformatting tools are automatic. I just have a little config file that says how long my lines are supposed to be and where i'd like the spaces on my parens (inside, between the parens and arguments) and then i hit ctrl+e and boom it's done. If i need to do it to many files, find + perltidy. In your case i would've just taken his new version, automatically formatted everything in less than 5 minutes, and merged on top of that.
3. When i do this, i'm doing it with team lead consent and team concensus, in an authority position, not with random code maintained by people i never even talked to. :)
The big problem (apart from the fact that ill-formatted codebases have often much more serious problems...) is that reformatting is an excellent way of messing up your VCS' diff ability, which is extremely precious in trying to understand why things have been done the way they have.
