Re: Multiline comment in Perl

From: "Rob Dixon" <[email protected]>
> The documentation that John referred you to recommends
>
>  =begin comment
>    :
>  =end
>
> Which may be a trifle awkward, but I'm sure there are worse things that 
> happen
> to you in your day. It takes less than a second to type, and if you do it 
> a lot
> you could set up a macro in your editor.

Unfortunately it doesn't work that way.
Even the POD documentation says that in the same perldoc -q ...:

"""
    The pod directives cannot go just anywhere. You must put a pod directive
    where the parser is expecting a new statement, not just in the middle of
    an expression or some other arbitrary grammar production.
"""

Here is an example that doesn't work:

if (1) {

=begin comment

print "ok";

=end comment

}

It gives the following error:
Missing right curly or square bracket at E:\zzz.pl line 11, at end of line

If the user uses the not recommended

=start
...
...
=cut

then it simply works, at least until a newer version of perl will decide 
that this should give an error.

Octavian