brian d foy writes: > In article > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Damian > Conway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > No. It's Pod. *Any* line that begins with '=begin' always starts a Pod > > block. Always. > > As you know, one of the biggest complaints about Perl is that you have > to have a lot of special rules knowledge to figure some things out.
Indeed. What's much nicer is to be able to state that a given rule "always" applies. Like Damian has just done here. Saying that C<=> at the start of a line always means Pod is much simpler than having a list of exceptions of places where it doesn't. > Also, doesn't this then limit Pod to Perl 6 (which I thought was not > the goal)? I reckon the complete opposite. > I doubt other languages will want to deal with this situation. With these new Pod rules it's possible to entirely remove Pod from a file without knowing _anything_ about the host language. (It could straightforwardly be done as an editor macro, for example.) That permits Pod to be used to document just about anything; all you need to allow it is a filter that strips off all Pod before you do anything else with the file. If Pod were to take notice of the host language's context throughout the file then this would not be possible: every language which wished to have Pod support would require its own Pod parser embedded within the languge parser. _That_ is orders of magnitude more complex than the simplicity of filtering off all Pod first, and strikes me as something other languages are much less likely to be bothered to do. Smylers
