Programming PERL in the .NET Environment

Plain Old Documentation

In the last several years, there has been a trend in software development that espouses the coupling of code and documentation in the same file. Prior to this trend, documentation was usually tasked separately, increasing the chances for inconsistencies between code and documentation.

Perl modules typically contain documentation along with code. The documentation is accomplished through a mini-markup language called Plain Old Documentation, or POD. The documentation is intended as markup for tools that come with the Perl distribution. The result of using the tools on a particular module will be HTML, text, or something else, depending upon the tool.

Using POD

When a POD translator reads a module, it looks for tags such ...