Use
pod is the language used for most documentation in the Perl world. This includes Perl itself, nearly all publicly-released modules, many scripts, most design documents, many articles on Perl.com and other Perl-related web sites, and the Parrot virtual machine.
pod is rarely read in the raw, although it is designed to be readable without the assistance of a formatting tool. Instead, it is read with the perldoc tool, or converted into Unix man pages or Web-standard HTML pages.
It is also possible to use pod in other contexts than Perl. For example to add simple documentation to bash scripts, which can then be easily converted to man pages. Such uses rely on language-specific hacks to hide the pod part(s), such as (in bash) prefixing the POD section with the line :<<=cut which works by calling bash's no-op : command, with the whole block of Pod as a here document as input to it.
Pure pod files usually have the extension .pod, but pod is mostly used directly in Perl code, which typically uses the .pl and .pm extensions. (The Perl interpreter's parser is designed to ignore pod in Perl code.) In source code files, the documentation is generally placed after the __END__ marker (which also helps syntax highlighting in some editors to display it as comments).
You can easily convert pod to other formats for example some of the various Wiki formats: Wiki formats like: WikiWikiWeb, Kwiki, TWiki, UseModWiki, TiddlyWiki, Textile, MediaWiki, MoinMoin or Confluence using Pod::Simple::Wiki.
Read more about this topic: Plain Old Documentation
Famous quotes containing the word use:
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—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)