Saying "POD parsers are stupid" implies somehow "They could be different".

This will never happen, because:

1. "Only Perl can parse Perl". It's very unlikely that POD parsing will ever be included into the Perl parser, to fix what you consider a bug. Hence we get a similar situation "Only POD can parse POD".

2. Even if the OP's code case was ... let's say "broken" POD ... by Larry's original intention (which I can't clearly read from the cited "specifications"), we have a de facto standard now. Too many people rely their applications on the simple but efficient parsing logic of POD parsers and nobody will ever dare to deprecate what you consider to be wrong.

(Another example of a "misuse" effectively becoming standard is the tolerance regarding empty lines surrounding =statements. Nobody will ever be able to enforce the original rules here so we have to accept the new standard.)

Is my point clearer now?

Cheers Rolf

UPDATE: Last but not least.

3. The possibility to have "dual" code evaluated by both parsers is a genius possibility to produce documentation in a DRY way, most people won't ever want to miss again.

In reply to Re^10: POD Meditation? by LanX
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.