Re: Re: Re: Why are you struggling with Modules

But reading documentation should not be a struggle, especially for someone who says they include RTFM-ing as part of their normal problem resolution.

If Perl's documentation style is such that is inherently difficult to understand, then I would posit that it needs to be changed. Note that this isn't a knock on Perldoc, which is more of a document definition. Rather, perhaps it's a knock on Perl documentation style. Structure versus content and all that. All modules should, in their documentation, have a clear and complete documentation of the interfaces present in the module. This may be all c is needing.

Comment on Re: Re: Re: Why are you struggling with Modules

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Re (tilly) 4: Why are you struggling with Modules by tilly (Archbishop) on Jul 25, 2001 at 20:52 UTC
Documentation style is a balance between what people find easy to read, and what authors are going to actually write. While it would be nice for beginners if people wrote customized tutorials that explained material in perltoot in every module, that realistically is not going to happen. And besides which, experienced Perl programmers won't want to spend time wading through a recitation of standard material. The style popular in Perl is one from Unix. It is terse, accurate, and to the point. Because it is terse, it is easy for a module writer to follow the style and actually document their complete module. So they do. Were it more verbose, it would be harder to write hence less often written, and harder to audit for errors, and therefore would be less accurate. But if you want to get a book, well you are going to have to buy it. Because that is not the way that POD is used, and people are generally not going to go out and verbosely document just for fun...	[reply]

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Re (tilly) 4: Why are you struggling with Modules
by tilly (Archbishop) on Jul 25, 2001 at 20:52 UTC

perltoot

The style popular in Perl is one from Unix. It is terse, accurate, and to the point. Because it is terse, it is easy for a module writer to follow the style and actually document their complete module. So they do. Were it more verbose, it would be harder to write hence less often written, and harder to audit for errors, and therefore would be less accurate.

But if you want to get a book, well you are going to have to buy it. Because that is not the way that POD is used, and people are generally not going to go out and verbosely document just for fun...

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