Why stake claim to all =begin UPPERCASE?
Hmmm... good question. To my knowledge there are no pod parsers that use uppercase names. I want to prevent a pod parser by accident adding debug code to the documentation of a module.
Uppercase letters stand out. So in that sense you could say I'm staking this claim, but only visually!
Please note that you can use uppercase names for your own pod parsers. You just can't activate it with begin then, because you'll most likely get compile errors because your documentation inside that =begin section will most likely not be intended to be executed.
You should pick 1 and stick with it (=begin begin sounds good).
As a developer, I want to be free in the choosing of my names. You might want to use DEBUGGING for real debug code, and VERBOSE for just making your script a bit more verbose than usual. Or FOO for some temporary stuff.
You should note that the =debug sections are parsed for all modules once "begin" is loaded. Activating DEBUGGING will activate all of the =begin DEBUGGING pod sections of all modules. So I'm actually thinking of adding some namespace support for it, e.g:
perl -MBEGIN=forks::TRACE myscriptusingforks.pl
would only activate the =begin sections inside the forks.pm module, whereas:
perl -MBEGIN=TRACE myscriptusingforks.pl
currently activates all modules that have a =begin TRACE pod section.
Liz |