On Feb 10, 4:38 pm, dam...@conway.org (Damian Conway) wrote: > I sincerely hope that the future community of designers of Perl 6 's > documentation format will find a way to honour and support the very > different needs of *all* the creators and users of Perl, not just the > needs of the most prominent, or the needs of the most experienced, or > the needs of the most loquacious. > > I have always thought that was the *real* challenge > of post-modern language design.
As is evidenced by John Gabriele's example, it's plenty easy to stuff something structured into a comment, and parse it. Given the multiple, flexible ways to get the Perl 6 parser to treat something as whitespace, this seems like a natural route for anyone who doesn't like Pod. Me, I love Pod. Three of the four basic metasyntaxes (X<>, =IDENT, :OPTION) are totally obvious to me, and the need for the fourth (#=) is just as obvious. I haven't used that fourth one only because I'm not used to it. I'll get used to it, and I bet I'll use it as much as I use the rest. I don't have any opinion about whether it's too hard to type, because my text editor generally makes it easy to not-type anything by typing something else. It was very easy for me (who knows POD) to learn Pod. Pod seems to basically be rationalized POD with a few new goodies. POD has proven flexible and durable. I see no evidence that Pod has lost either of those desirable attributes, and some evidence that it has enhanced both. Pod seems to have evolved POD in much the same way that Perl 6 is evolving Perl 5. I laud the symmetry there. It "fits" in my brain. Last, but not least, it's a friggin postmodern language, people. Easy enough for anyone who doesn't love Pod to make it do something different. Pod will just be what it does by default. Maybe I'm the only one, but I think it's a pretty nice default. Now, all of that being said, I do agree with the point that S26 needs some spit and polish (at the very least, that it would reflect the current consensus on what Pod is right now). I also, like most of you, have a commit bit to the Pugs repository. From that point, it seems like we ought to focus the conversation not on how Pod "feels" to us, but on answering two questions: What can't I do with Pod that I ought to be able to? What could make it easier to parse Pod (for a human or a computer) without losing something essential? Once we've got something we can all live with, then we can start putting it through contortions by duck-punching or monkey-pooping or whatever it's called, and see if we can't make it into something that makes us all just a little bit insane :-P -db.
