What is Literate Programming?

[Reino de Boer]

cotner at brahms.berkeley.edu (Carl Cotner) writes:

>Does anyone have any information about Donald Knuth's Literate 
>Programming concept.  Is this explained in his books, The Art of 
>Computer Programming?  I'm only aware of Knuth through TeX. [...]

``The WEB system of structured documentation'' by Donald E. Knuth,
Stanford Computer Science Report 980 (Stanford, California, September,
1983), 206 pp. A ten-page user manual for WEB, followed by complete
programs for WEB in its own language.

``Literate programming'' by Donald E. Knuth, The Computer Journal 27
(1984), 97--111. An expository introduction to WEB and its underlying
philosophy.

>I'm very interested in this.  I would look into web, only I believe that
>web will extract a Pascal file.  I'm more interested in working on a
>C based project.  Is there a C version of WEB?

Yes, there is, and it is distributed along with TeX for UNIX systems (as
far as I'm aware). The relevant programs are called Cweave and Ctangle.

>Thanks

You're welcome -- Reino

-- 
Reino R. A. de Boer
Erasmus University Rotterdam ( Informatica )
e-mail: reino at cs.eur.nl