There was a thread at Inline POD vs. EOF POD a while ago about the joys of inline versus eof POD. While a lot of people seemed to like inline, my strong sympathies go with the position put forth by tye and Abigail that eof is better for POD.

In particular I liked Abigail's explanation of why inline is a problem. To it I can only add the point that synchronization of POD and code should be far less of a problem than synchronization of general comments and code. The POD is about the public interface. Public interfaces should not be changed as capriciously as code. If you do change them, you need to track down all of the code that used the old interface and change that as well. Compared to that synchronization, modifying the POD is a small cost.

Comments that need synchronization with code for me go inline. There your point about distance is relevant. But I strongly prefer having POD at the end of the file.