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
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