Design
pod is designed to be a simple, clean language with just enough syntax to be useful. It purposefully does not include mechanisms for fonts, images, colors or tables. Some of its goals are:
- Easy to parse
- Easy to convert to other formats, such as XML or TeX
- Easy to incorporate sample code
- Easy to read without a pod formatter (i.e. in its source-code form)
- Easy to write in—otherwise programmers won't write the documentation!
An extended version of pod that supports tables and footnotes called PseudoPOD has been used by O'Reilly & Associates to produce several Perl books, most notably Programming Perl by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant. Mark Jason Dominus used a modified version called mod to write Higher-Order Perl.
pod makes it easy to write manual pages, which are well suited to user-oriented documents. In contrast, other documentation systems, such as Python's Docstring or Java's Javadoc, though can be used for user documentation, are designed to facilitate generating developer-oriented documentation about the source code for a software project.
Read more about this topic: Plain Old Documentation
Famous quotes containing the word design:
“Joe ... you remember I said you wouldn’t be cheated?... Nobody is really. Eventually all things work out. There’s a design in everything.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“We find that Good and Evil happen alike to all Men on this Side of the Grave; and as the principle Design of Tragedy is to raise Commiseration and Terror in the Minds of the Audience, we shall defeat this great End, if we always make Virtue and Innocence happy and successful.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
“A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.”
—Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)