The --doc command

The --doc (notice the double hyphen) command-line extracts the documentation from the program and prints it. Here, the so-called Pod documentation is meant. We will cover the Pod syntax in Chapter 2, Writing Code.

Let's see the small program that includes the documentation inside itself:

=begin pod
=head1 Hello, World program
=item This program prints "Hello, World!"
=end pod

say "Hello, World!";

Run it with the --doc command-line option as follows:

$ perl6 --doc pod.pl

It will print only parts of the documentation. The code itself will not be executed:

 Hello, World program
 
   * This program prints "Hello, World!"