Re: The eternal "use XXX instead of POD" debate (was: Project Start: ?Section 1)

wrote on Mon, 11 Nov 2002 15:50:34 -0800:
>I'd love to see a cleaner POD,

Have you looked at perlpodspec, and had a look at the new Pod::Simple 
formatters?

>with tables,

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.

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 "^".


>better support for lists,

In what sense?  If you want something to happen in Pod, ask on the 
Pod-people list.


>and the ability to turn syntax inferencing on a per-document basis.

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".


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/