The 2001 Perl Advent Calendar
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On the 15th day of Advent my True Language brought to me..
Pod::Coverage

When you write Perl modules you should include documentation with the code so that people know how to use it. Actually this is backwards - you should write documentation so you know what you're coding. Either way, documentation and code should go hand in hand.

We need documentation as sooner or later we all have to use the code that someone else has written. It's a real pain to have to use or modify some code when you don't know what the code is supposed to do and you can't get hold of the author. Everyone should simply document, document, document.

The problem with this is that sometimes things get overlooked - and it's the person that's writing the code and documenting it that's the most likely to fail to spot when something isn't documented as they're simply too close to the code itself and the assumptions they've made. What we need is some automated tool that could intelligently go though our code and quickly check what methods, subroutines and accessors haven't been documented in the POD. And this is exactly what Pod::Coverage does. Flawlessly, quickly, easily, and simply.

  • perlpod
  • perlpodspec