Re^2: Perl6 Pod -- reinventing the wheel? (=para)

[tye]

Given your example and some of what you wrote (including criticism of "=cut"), I got the impression that the Perl-5-style "obvious" way to write paragraphs and verbatim text blocks had been dropped. I think that it is one of the best features of (Perl 5) POD, that you can denote a paragraph by simply adding a blank line and denote sample code by simply indenting a paragraph (both so intuitive, compact, clear, and convenient that they were obvious to both the author and the reader).

Checking the linked Synopsis, I see that this isn't the case. The obvious method is still supported. The example in the (well, that is the) Synopsis looks much more like Perl 5 POD and looks better, IMO, than the example you gave above. Just for y'all's information (including other readers who might have gotten a similar impression but didn't want to bother to browse the Synopsis).

Thanks for the Synopsis and for the explanation here, Damian.

[TheDamian]

To expand on Tye's comment, you could of course still write in a more traditional Perl documentation style:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

=begin pod

=head1 A few good subs

This is a line of Pod. This module contains
some functions and  might be used as follows:

    do_something(); # Magic happens here!

=end pod


# ------------------
# Subroutines
# ------------------

=begin pod

=head2 do_something

You'd use this I<awesome> function for:

=item  
When you want to do foo.

=item  
When you want to do bar, since foo obviously
isn't cutting it.

=end pod

sub do_something {
    print "Magic goes here.\n";
}

print "hi.\n";
do_something;
print "bye!\n";

...if you preferred.

I'd argue that this version is also much cleaner and less intrusive than Texinfo or HTML (or even classic POD). Whether it's better than the version I showed earlier is, I suspect, a matter of personal preference. Some people will prefer the clarity of explicit tags, others will prefer the elegance of implicit contextual cues.

The point being, of course, that Pod is part of Perl 6, and hence TMTOWTDI.

Damian