I'd say "can't indent them" is a feature.

Be definition, we are talking about cases of multiline comments, and such a chunk deserves easily identifiable start/stop markers. On their own lines. And of course everything between the markers gets to stay exactly where it was before you marked it off. Later, if you decide that you can live with those lines running after all (as below), you can put '#' comments in front of your pod markers; don't delete your pod markers because you may change your mind yet again and desire to re-ignore those lines.

#=pod

    #no warnings 'all';        # doesn't seem to prevent error message
+s....
    my $xform = new RTF::TEXT::Converter->new( 
                                    output => \$output_string
                                                 );
    $xform->parse_string( $input_string );

#=cut
[download]

But a "good style" rule somewhere says "Don't abuse pod this way!" Well, I don't put my user documentation for the program within the file, I put it in it's own separate pod file, and so the two usages never get mixed up.

I also use the 'if 0' approach to isolate code blocks that I don't want to run. Particularly for code blocks that help me with debugging. By formatting them as follows, i.e. with 'if 1' starting in column 1 when I want a debugging section to fire, I can find those sections easily via vim with '/^if 1' and turn them off by editing to 'if 0'. While I could also use a "$debug" flag, I'd then have to wade through all the other debugging output from the other 'if $debug' sections when I really only want the surgical strike of enabling this particular block. The problem with using 'if 0' to comment out questionable/narrative sections of stuff is that the compiler complains about improper innards even though you don't want any of it to run.

do {
    # Should be unnecessary to see this; the data is in the dd_config_
+info file
    my $msg = Dumper(
            \%ddcon_contents,
            \@ddcon_order,
            $dd_con_defaults,
            );
    esdw "ddc_data2 $msg\n";
}
if 1;
[download]

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.