Heh.. you reminded me of the joke:

Yes, I can write with either hand, I'm amphibious!

On a more serious note.. thats an excellent question you bring up, and I'd definitely like to see others opinions on the matter too.

Overall, I personally like inline POD better, from the coders point of view. The fact that it gets the code and documentation close together makes it much easier to keep both up to date. I'll often use POD to document my API's and such, instead of using normal comments. There are a lot of projects out there that readily admit to having poor documentation. With inline POD, there is often no excuse for such behaviour. That would be false laziness, and none of us Perl types would do that, right?? :-)

The problem with POD is that it's darn ugly. I appologize, I don't wish to badmouth it, but it really just is ugly :-) But I find that if you come up with a standard for how to use POD throughout your code to document functions and such, it can get easier to read with practice. Now, others reading your code will have to struggle with it at first.. but IMO, having up to date documentation is worth the added discomfort.
-Eric

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