wrote on Mon, 11 Nov 2002 15:50:34 -0800:
Have you looked at perlpodspec, and had a look at the new Pod::Simple formatters?I'd love to see a cleaner POD,
I like tables, but it is sheer agony to produce tables in many output formats. I'm starting to wonder whether some kind of verbatim block might be the answer, so that parsers that have said that they know about tables, will get tables; and otherwise they'll get the verbatim block.with tables,
Something like:
#:table-lines
| | |
inches twips points centimeters
20 tw 1 pt
40 tw 2 pt
~57 tw .1cm
60 tw 3 pt
80 tw 4 pt
1/16" 90 tw 4.5 pts
That assumes that each line is one row. Presumably a similar syntax could be adapted to cases where that's not the case.
That's vaguely like the verbatim-formatted stuff that I've been experimenting with lately, where the second line here:
flock COUNTER, LOCK_EX;
#: ^^^^^^^
bolds the characters above the "^".
In what sense? If you want something to happen in Pod, ask on the Pod-people list.better support for lists,
On the Pod-people list, we have mostly decided that those inference rules are more trouble than they are worth, precisely because they are unpredictable, and typically there's no way to disable them. I am entirely happy with a future for Pod where no formatter (or, god help us, a parser) thinks it its duty to turn "an O(N) solution" into "an C<O(N)> solution".and the ability to turn syntax inferencing on a per-document basis.
I distinctly sense that the discussion here is very much like previous grieve-and-growl sessions, where people too often say little more than "I don't like X about Pod" when they're not talking about Pod at all, but just some some appalling old version of Pod::Html or Pod::Man. It's like complaining that Perl doesn't have objects since you never know when you'll be using Perl 4.
--
Sean M. Burke http://search.cpan.org/author/sburke/
