yeah see my update, (coevolution of better ideas! ;)

> Edit: in the end yes, POD may actually be the best idea. My bad :D

maybe a good feature request to to make empty =for without FORMAT and surrounding blank lines official for multi-line comments

print "start - ";
=for
bla
bla
=cut
print "stop!";
[download]

My perl-parser as well as perldoc ignore those lines. Only emacs' cperl-mode insist on surrounding blank lines.

Well, if there's a change to include multi line comments, you might as well choose something that doesn't look like what its not and introduce specific syntax (although POD comments have the advantage of not breaking backward compatibility), it's not just about the parsers, it's also about people reading the code (when you get used to POD containing useless code, you may ignore perfectly useful documentation embeded in the code). And well, if the feature still isn't included in perl after all those years, it's certainly not because no one ever thought of a solution, it's on purpose (I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that Larry Wall doesn't like them, for some reasons (and there are good reasons)).

I like the empty =for solution b/c it's concise (only four letters¹) and backwards compatible and you can easily extend it by adding a format.

Though as long as it's not documented some pod-parser might fail if no format is given.

I think Larry might not like them cause /* ... */ might be easily overlooked and therfore people tend to indent the text in between.

> (when you get used to POD containing useless code, you may ignore perfectly useful documentation embeded in the code)

POD is rarely interspersed like in literal programming, and personally I never tend to ignore it more then comments.

Take a look into perl5db.pl as an example.

Cheers Rolf

_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)}

¹) With Python needing 3 doublequotes """ this seems a compatative solution.

update

Though POD fails if you need to adjust to surrounding indentation. There is a reason why one should always look up older discussions. ;)

My perl-parser as well as perldoc ignore those lines. Only emacs' cperl-mode insist on surrounding blank lines.

IIRC, older POD parsers required blank lines around command paragraphs.

--MidLifeXis

True but it's not meant for POD anyway, as long the compiler ignores it it's fine.

Cheers Rolf

_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)}