At 11:59 PM -0400 10/2/02, Erik Lechak wrote:
> By the way is this an RFC thing?
Well, changes to POD as far as perl is concerned is probably a RFC
thing, but I don't think I'd bother--I know Larry and Damian have
some stuff up their sleeves for POD, heredocs, and suchlike things.
> Should this "concept" be submitted to someone other than this
>group? Who makes the call about what finds its way into perl err
>... I mean parrot?
For parrot, that'd be me. Perl's Larry's domain.
>If others want me to continue with this. The next step would be to
>throw away 90% of my code and parse the parrotdoc into true XML.
>Then that opens up parrotdoc to all the functionality of XML.
I should point out that I have an unreasonable loathing of XML.
Something worth keeping in mind. :)
This also doesn't really buy us anything over what we have now with
POD. Yes, POD has a number of problems (I could make a list, if I had
to, but I'd probably snag someone else's list and save myself the
hassle) but we have a lot of tools to parse it now, and it's simple
enough that you can ignore it when reading the raw docs, which is
important.
If we want to define some (simple!) conventions for embedded POD docs
in the source, I'd be fine with that--strikes me as a good idea. And
I don't have a problem either fixing entities with broken semantics,
or adding in different entities with the semantics we need. But I
think we should stick with POD. It's no worse than the alternatives,
so there's no real incentive to change.
If we *were* going to change, I think I'd go all-out and use real
metadata, but that'd require custom editing tools and suchlike
things, which would make use in plain-text environments rather
difficult. (Which is one of the practical problems with XML)
--
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
