Plain Old Documentation |
Plain Old Documentation, commonly abbreviated as POD, is a simple platform-independent model documentation tool for the computer language Perl.
=Intent=
POD is designed to be a simple, clean language with just enough syntax to be useful. It purposefully does not include built-in mechanisms for fonts, images, colors or tables; instead it attempts to be just large enough to be useful. Some of its goals are:
Although the author of [http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.8.0/pod/perlpod.html perlpod] notes that The Pod format is not necessarily sufficient for writing a book , books have in fact been written in an extended version of POD; this special version included formatting codes for tables and footnotes, and is used by O Reilly & Associates to produce several Perl books, most notably Programming Perl by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant.
=Use=
POD is the language used for most documentation in the Perl world. This includes Perl itself, nearly all publicly-released Perl module, many script (computer programming)s, most design documents, many articles on [http://www.perl.com/ Perl.com] and other Perl-related web sites, and the Parrot virtual machine.
POD is rarely read in the raw, although it is designed to readable without the assistance of a formatting tool. Instead, it is read with the perldoc tool, or converted into Unix man pages or Web-standard HTML pages.
Pure POD files usually have the extension .pod, but POD is mostly used directly in Perl code, which typically uses the .pl and .pm extensions. (The Perl interpreter s parser is designed to ignore POD in Perl code.)
=Sample POD Document=
This document is syntactically correct POD, which attempts to follow the major conventions on section naming as well.
=head1 TITLE podsample - A sample POD document =head1 SYNOPSIS $here->isa(Piece::Of::Code); print|
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