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.

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. ;)