in reply to documentation generator? web-enabled perldoc?

doxygen parses sourcecode to determine constants, function signatures, etc.. function signature won't work for perl (as i'm sure you realize).

doxygen includes hyperlinked syntaxt hilighted sourcecode in its output, and there is no reason you couldn't do that with perl other than its of little use most of the time (and parsing perl is hard).

doxygen links all function references to the function documentation, and there's no reason a pod translator couldn't do that (in fact Pod::Html tries to resolve those when possible).

Anyway, here is something other than just pod:

Anyway, perl's only issue with pod (besides the fact that L<blah blah|http://some.url/> isn't legal yet), is that there aren't many tools (like doxygen) to generate pod from raw source (as much is possible) for module writers (module users shouldn't need to deal with such tools).

BTW - I like pod :)

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Re^2: documentation generator? web-enabled perldoc?
by geektron (Curate) on Aug 07, 2004 at 15:36 UTC
    yes, i think we all know how you feel about POD. ;-)

    i've thought of something like POD on steroids. pod2html is a nice start for web-enabling the whole thing, and some kind of (ack!) custom parser could generate the meta-data to shove info into a database and "make it searchable" (so could something like htdig, but i worry about false positive and things like that just from a full-text search ).

    i like POD, but POD does have its limitations. one of the main limitiations being that any 'cross-references' (like function Foo::bar called by package Bar::baz ) has to be done by hand. for an undocumented application that's sliced way too thin ... that's going to be a nightmare.

    ( the app author seriously has modules like:
    Application::Mailer::Mailer::SendMail
    which does NOTHING but accept a stringified MIME::Lite message ( from  $obj->as_string() ), open a SENDMAIL pipe, and print to that pipe. i don't know about everyone else, but that's a bit too sliced for my taste.

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