Comments and POD have two different purposes. Comments are there for the programmer. The person who has to maintain the code. POD is there to create user documentation from. For the person using the code. POD should not be interleaved with the code because this makes it harder to find the code.

There would be no need for this if Perl had multi-line comments. And please don't tell me about the Acme module. Or the infamous here-doc technique. This must change! This is so sad!

http://dev.perl.org/rfc/5.html