Item 82. Embed your documentation with Pod

A good many software developers, especially those working on sizable projects, work to coding standards that require them to start off function definitions with block comments that provide key information about that function—overview, inputs, outputs, preconditions, change history, and the like. If they format those embedded comments precisely enough, scripts can parse, extract, and reformat into documentation.

A source file could thus be its own programming reference. This is a good thing, because it allows developers to tweak the documentation each time they tweak the code without having to locate and edit a separate document. Sometimes this is about all the documentation that a developer can manage to do correctly.