On Dec 18, 2012 7:10 AM, "Timothy Pickering" <[email protected]> wrote: > > > The chief reason is that Perl's documentation format, POD, is actually really good, unlike Python's documentation format, for example. As such, Perl programmers have bent their expectations and mode of expression into using the tool at hand (POD) rather than creating the more expressive notebook style of documenting things. > > you can compare POD to python docstring/doctest, but comparing it to ipython notebooks is completely apples to oranges. notebooks aren't for documenting python code, but rather to document work done using python. you want to use something like POD to document the final, production scripts/code, but something like a notebook is very, very handy for figuring out, documenting, and sharing the steps taken to get there. > > tim
Apples, oranges, and bananas! POD is far more expressive than Python's doc strings because it actually has typesetting capabilities and is not chained to specific functions or class definitions. In fact, I have used POD in the exact way that you describe only works with notebooks! :-) But, let's stick with the fruit analogy. Perl programmers have really good apples. The PDL documentation subsystem provides us a way to get our bananas, too. It is not a huge surprise, then, that nobody has felt compelled to plant orange trees, even though they're an excellent source of vitamin C. David
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