Re^2: POD as a general documentation system (pod is readable)

[Aristotle]

in reply to Re: POD as a general documentation system
in thread POD as a general documentation system

But you don't! Any Joe Random User will understand what

=HEAD1 SYNOPSIS

means. There's rarely a lot more markup in POD and the spec is very simple - even if it changes in the future, the basic syntax (=FOO) is not going to change. The fact that the tools in existence are written in Perl is a red herring. In their absence, less works just as well. Of course the format is so simple you can easily write parsers in another language. I've used sed once.

I did mix up the "two decades" thing - code and docs were wrapped before Perl5 too, but I forgot the Perl4 way of doing that was *roff.

Makeshifts last the longest.

[Abigail-II]

You are over estimating Joe Random User. =head1 isn't clear at all, let alone =head2. Maybe he would have understood =title and =section. And you really think Joe Random User is going to understand =over? Or L<text|name/sec>?

And if you are going to use a pager to read POD anyway, you'd be better off it it was written in plain ASCII.

Abigail

[Aristotle]

Well, we'll have to disagree about the clarity of the command paragraphs then. The interior sequences might be problematic, but other than complex L<>s and E<> they're easy to ignore. In plaintext, you can't represent references directly anyway; the same solutions you come up with there are likely to work for POD as simple L<>s.

I did say "in the absence of a POD parser" when I said you can read POD using a pager.

Makeshifts last the longest.