Course of Raku / Advanced / Testing and documentation 🆕 / Documenting code 🆕

Accessing the Pod

Besides rendering it, a program can read its own Pod from inside, while it runs. The special variable $=pod holds the Pod of the current file as a list of block objects, so a program can inspect its own documentation:

=begin pod
=head1 Hello
A paragraph.
=end pod

say $=pod.elems;      # 1
say $=pod[0].name;    # pod

$=pod here has one element — the pod block — and you can walk into it to read headings, paragraphs, and items as data. This is what tools that generate documentation, or test that it is present, rely on. Whether rendered with --doc or read through $=pod, the documentation is a first-class part of the program, not a comment to be stripped away.

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