Talk:Plain Old Documentation
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Syntax[edit]
A single uppercase letter, followed by a greater-than sign (<), the content to be formatted, and a less-than sign (>), e.g. B<bolded text>, or
Looks like the author mixed up greater-than and lesser-than signs (respectively > and <)
82.72.71.31 20:55, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
Abreviations[edit]
Every POD I've ever seen has NAME as the first section, not TITLE. 70.125.51.248
- Euh, I think plain old documentation is normally abbreviated "pod", not "POD". At least, that's how Larry spells it in the Camel book...
Page formating error[edit]
It looks like there is some mixup between the pod example and the layout of the wiki page itself. COPYRIGHT is showing up in the table of contents. and real sections like ***References*** are showing up as sub-heading of COPYRIGHT. Attys (talk) 19:26, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
Excerpted quote from Stephen Kitt's accepted answer from 2019-Jan-29 (Edit Feb-5) on that page:
"This commit (recreated much later) introduces POD files, in version 5.000; its parent, corresponding to alpha 9, doesn’t have them, so it appears they were introduced between alpha 9 in May 1994 and the 5.000 release in October 1994.
"This message on comp.lang.perl suggests that POD was a reaction to roff (and its availability, or lack thereof, on various platforms), among other reasons:
"I'm very well aware of this but it requires nroff (not readily available on VMS, MS-DOS, AmigaDOS etc).
"This is one of the reasons Larry moved away from *roff format for the Perl 5 documentation. The P in pod can also stand for portable.[2]
"and this message quotes another message (not available in the archives) which says
"Sorry if I appear to be a yokal, but what is this pod stuff anyway?
"I've never heard of it before now.
"plain old documentation. it's a format larry designed recently for use by perl5. the ideas are it's easy of use, and that you write some translator from pod to some other markup language (two of these exist currently - pod2man and pod2html), so you can read it how ever you want.[3]
"(The highlighting is mine, or rather Axel’s.)"
[End of first quote]
Which is then followed by this comment from Axel Beckert on 2019-Feb-1:
"Thanks a lot for the addition of the Usenet posting to this answer. Actually a few postings later, there's written much of what I wanted to know. While that posting is just citing another (seemingly not archived) posting, it still contains the relevant parts: "it's a format larry designed recently for use by perl5.""[4]
Tree4rest (talk) 22:39, 24 August 2019 (UTC)75.40.75.180
References
- ^ https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/9003/how-old-is-perls-plain-old-documentation-pod-format-and-why-was-it-called#
- ^ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.perl/rSvC42jEiWs/UsOiH26QYTYJ
- ^ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.perl/rSvC42jEiWs/DBlyx7BGmSUJ
- ^ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.perl/rSvC42jEiWs/DBlyx7BGmSUJ