To make the best use of this (POD directives) you need an editor that does syntax highlighting. Otherwise there is a chance that you will think you are in the middle of real code when really you are in comments. At least with a # on every line there is less chance of that. If you are using vi/gvim as your editor I'm pretty sure that you could insert the comment character at the front of a range of lines with something like:

'a,'b s/^/#/

Where a and b are the marked start and end positions of the range.