Personally, I'd love to see the POD parsers handle some Wiki formatting idioms like the bullet lists.

Any line following a blank line and starting with an asterisk should be seen as an implied =item * instead, using an =over 4 if the preceding paragraph wasn't also a bulleted item.

Any line following such a bullet item and starting with an asterisk should also be seen as an implied =item.

If there is leading whitespace, and the previous line is a bullet item, then inject another =over 4.

To avoid conflict between indented code areas and numbered lists, nested lists have to follow their parents without a blank line. First-column lists can have blank lines above them. Unlike Wiki, you wouldn't need to terminate a list: just start something with less indent or with no asterisk.

An indented line without bullet but immediately following a bulleted line would be seen as a new flowing paragraph at the same indent level, not as the start of a preformatted indented code block.

Same goes for the # for numbered lists; since it's in POD, there's no overlap with Perl comments.

Roughly:

=head1 METHODS

* new()

  # This is a code block with a Perl comment since
  # it's indented and follows a blank line.
  my $foo = new MyClass(parameters);

Creates a new instance of MyClass.  Valid parameters:
  # --style
    Sets the initial style parameter.  Valid styles:
    * dotted
    * dashed
    * stippled
  # --text
    Sets the initial text parameter.

=cut
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A lot briefer and more readable than the =over4/=item*/=item2 equivalent, I think. And since it can still be expressed AS the above items, maybe it can just be done as a preprocessor step.

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