This and other RFCs are available on the web at http://dev.perl.org/rfc/ =head1 TITLE Add a "emit pod" runtime option to Perl =head1 VERSION Maintainer: Adam Turoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 24 Sep 2000 Last Modified: 26 Sep 2000 Mailing List: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Number: 286 Version: 2 Status: Frozen =head1 ABSTRACT It would be really handy if there were a core mechanism to emit the documentation embedded in a Perl program/module. =head1 NOTES Not much discussion came out of this proposal. John Porter mentioned that this would be trivial to implement, if RFC 79 is implemented. =head1 DESCRIPTION Tom Christiansen proposed this in his perl6storm message: =item perl6storm #0004 Need perl to spit out pod/non-pod, like cc -E. Pod is too hard to parse. This would make catpod trivially implemented as a compiler filter. This feature would be quite useful, aside from just Tom's example of 'catpod'. While RFC 79 proposes a much broader mechanism, this RFC proposes that Perl simply have three modes - one where POD is ignored and Perl code is analyzed and interpreted, one mode where Perl code is ignored and POD is emitted, and one mode where POD is ignored and Perl code is emitted without any parsing or interpretation. This RFC does not require RFC 79-style interleaved POD streams to be implemented. =head1 IMPLEMENTATION Many options exist, including mucking around with the core to have a simple commandline flag (e.g. C<perl -E>) The most sensible implementation would be to write a standard module that was a compiler backend, and invoked easliy, as in: perl -MPOD -e "emit()" *.pl *.pm t/*.t Another option would be to tweak the parser to ignore Perl code and simply emit any POD it would otherwise ignore, as well as emit the Perl code it would otherwise process after ignoring POD as usual. =head1 REFERENCES RFC 79: perl6storm
