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:
“Delay always breeds danger; and to protract a great design is often to ruin it.”
—Miguel De Cervantes (1547–1616)
“You can make as good a design out of an American turkey as a Japanese out of his native stork.”
—For the State of Illinois, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The reason American cars don’t sell anymore is that they have forgotten how to design the American Dream. What does it matter if you buy a car today or six months from now, because cars are not beautiful. That’s why the American auto industry is in trouble: no design, no desire.”
—Karl Lagerfeld (b. 1938)