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Literate
Programming FAQ.
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Literate
Programming
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Literate
programming is a methodology that combines a programming language
with a documentation language, thereby making programs more
robust, more portable, more easily maintained, and arguably more
fun to write than programs that are written only in a high-level
language. The main idea is to treat a program as a piece of
literature, addressed to human beings rather than to a
computer. The program is also viewed as a hypertext document,
rather like the World Wide Web. (Indeed, I used the word WEB for
this purpose long before CERN grabbed it!) This book is an
anthology of essays including my early papers on related topics
such as structured programming, as well as the article in The
Computer Journal that launched Literate Programming itself. The
articles have been revised, extended, and brought up to date.
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Quick introduction to literate programming by Chris Lee
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Literate
programming is an approach to programming which emphasises that
programs should be written to be read by people as well as
compilers. From a purist standpoint, a program could be
considered a publishable-quality document that argues
mathematically for its own correctness. A different approach is
that a program could be a document that teaches programming to
the reader through its own example. A more casual approach to
literate programming would be that a program should be documented
at least well enough that someone could maintain the code
properly and make informed changes in a reasonable amount of time
without direct help from the author. At the most casual level, a
literate program should at least make its own workings plain to
the author of the program so that at least the author can easily
maintain the code over its lifetime.
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Programs
to Read (by D.E. Knuth)
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I write lots of
CWEB programs, primarily for my own
edification. If there is sufficient interest, I'll make a large subset
of them available via the Internet. For now, I'm listing only a few.
The first two show (by quite different methods) that exactly 2,432,932
knight's tours are unchanged by 180-degree rotation of the chessboard.
The third was used to compute some of the tables in
Axioms and Hulls
that several people have asked about.
The fourth was used in one of my otherwise unpublished lectures in the
Computer Musings series. The next few were
requested by members of the Academy of Recreational Mathmaticians
in Japan. And so on.
Note: Many of my programs, including the first two samples, use
the conventions and library of
The Stanford GraphBase.
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Donald
E. Knuth's Home Page
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Literate programming
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Articles, FAQ, books, and bibliography
Manuals for literate programming tools
Examples of literate programs
The best of comp.programming.literate
Download tools and utilities
Recommendation for literate programming
Boost Graph Library