Re: Multi-line comments in perl code?

in reply to Multi-line comments in perl code?

I think it's useful to boil down what's already been said or referred to.

POD is the official way to do multi line comments in Perl, whether you think of it as as a work-around or not (which varies),
use "=for comment" or "=begin/end comment" for stuff that's just comments and shouldn't show up in the output text when documentation is extracted from the code, such as when you run perldoc on the program,
You can't indent the "=for comment", so it's not quite like other language's multiline comments, and
You do need a "=cut" at the end to get back to code. (I think this might be your main objection to using POD, and, yes, you're stuck with it).

The last item may change with Perl6, for "=begin/end", but the rest will probably not. See Apocalypse 2 RFC 5

Here's an example which you can runn with "perl" and with "perldoc" to see what shows up where. Note that in many places, such as before the "=cut", the blank line is part of the syntax.


=head1 tstcmt.pl

This is text that shows up with the "perldoc tstcmt.pl" 
command. The comment sections below do not.

=cut

print "hello\n";

=for comment 
This is a single paragraph of comment text, spanning
multiple lines. It ends with the first blank line.
After that, the text is inuded with other printed pod text
that shows up with perldoc

This text also shows up with perldoc, it's not part of 
the "for" comment above.

=cut

print "hello1\n";

=for comment 
Another paragraph of comment text, spanning
multiple lines. It ends with the first blank line.

=cut

print "hello2\n";

=begin comment
This is a multi-paragraph comment section.
Which is terminated by an =end comment on a line by itself.

This is a second paragraph

=end comment

=cut

print "hello3\n";

=head2 Other pod documentation

This is text that also shows up with the "perldoc tstcmt.pl" 
command. The comment sections above do not.

=cut

print "hello4\n"
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