It's code that is tricking all the POD parsers. See, in your code snippet, there is no POD. POD section are defined as to start with the a '=' (followed by a letter) at the beginning of a line, when perl expects a new statement. But here, at the moment of =pod, perl isn't expecting a new statement. In fact, it's busy finding the end of a here document -- whose end is =cut.

So, what's happening here is that: 


=pod

This module uses the following constants:
                                        
    bang_eth => 1                       
    biff     => 2
    krunch   => 3

[download]
is a here document (it starts with a blank line above =pod, and ends with a blank line), with =cut as terminator. The rest is just parsing this string.

Why does it appear in the documentation? Because POD parsers actually don't parse POD. They parse anything between ^=\w and ^=cut, without looking at context, assuming to capture all the POD (and nothing but the POD). Most of the time, this heuristic works well, but as with all heuristics, it sometimes will break down, and someone will (a)buse it.

In reply to Re: POD Meditation? by JavaFan
in thread POD Meditation? by temporal

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.