I'm going to stay away from the "POD referencing Perl" debate for the time being. Instead, a couple of thoughts:
1. It has always been my understanding that comments intimately relate to documentation, despite being part of Perl's syntax. As such, they are a technical violation of this "separation of Church and State", being State-sponsored religion as it were. (Who'd have thought that we'd be talking politics and religion on a programming language mailing list? Egad!) Not that I'm advocating the removal of comments; their sheer practical value makes up for their heathen ways. 2. Getting block comments to hide POD blocks wouldn't require the POD parser to have a full implementation of a Perl parser. It would require the POD parser to have a _limited_ implementation of a Perl parser, one that's capable of identifying block comments. And IIRC, you already have to do something like this with respect to block quotes: say :to(END); =begin POD blah blah blah =end POD END If I understand matters correctly, the "POD code" in the above example isn't POD code at all, but rather the content of a multi-line quote. So extending the POD parser's awareness of Perl syntax to handle block comments as well isn't much of a stretch. -- Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang
