POD != comments.

Perl does support comments, and comments can be introduced almost anywhere where a new token is expected.

However, the problem you have is with POD. The interpreter itself will only skip POD sections if it's expecting a new statement. Which is were your problem lies. On the flip side, I'm not aware of any POD parser that isn't naïve, and extracts POD from files where perl wouldn't. POD parsers typically just look for /^=\w/, ignoring context. (Really bad parsers look for /^=/).