in reply to Perl code - sometimes UGLY...

Why waste a lot of time with useless technical documentation when the code is self explaining.
If you like images in your documentation then use formatting hints and pod2html.
=for html <img src="thebigpicture.gif"/> =cut
If POD obfuscates your view on source code then use a decent IDE http://www.epic-ide.org/ which can fold pod comments.

print+qq(\L@{[ref\&@]}@{['@'x7^'!#2/"!4']});