From: Larry Felton Johnson Date: 2004-02-27T19:38:21+09:00 Subject: Re: Docs [Was Regarding PLD RPMs of rake and ruby-dbi and a plea to packagers] I haven't looked at noweb, but it's actually on my reading list, since my reading list is basically from these two pages on one of the Literate Programming web sites plus Knuth's book. http://www.literateprogramming.com/farticles.html http://www.literateprogramming.com/fmanuals.html I haven't gotten far enough along on the list to know what the capabilities of all the different tools are. It would be nice if both the tangle and the weave portions of whatever tool I settled on were retargetable (in other words in addition to adding languages one could use whatever markup or formatting language was to the environment). I'm not overly ambitious with this idea (that is, it wasn't my plan to try to foist a whole programming approach along with its particular tools onto the ruby community before I've programmed in that language long enough to be able to build simple conditional statements without looking at a manual). A round of documentation rewriting at my workplace got me interested in approaches to documentation, so I was taking a fresh look at literate programming. At the same time I had begun tinkering with ruby again and had the thought "Aha! I'm looking at literate programming plus I'm looking at a language which is new to me. Why don't I mock up some tools for literate programming in that language? It'll advance my understanding of both the language and literate programming". Larry On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 04:59:57PM +0900, Andrew Johnson wrote: > On Fri, 27 Feb 2004 12:29:28 +0900, Larry Felton Johnson wrote: > > Funny you should mention that. I've been looking over the > > CWEB syntax thinking about writing a simple tangle/weave system > > in and for ruby as an exercise. I've always been interested in > > literate programming, never really done anything with it except > > read the docs. > > Just for info: noweb is a language independent LP system that'll work > just fine for Ruby. However, development of noweb seems nonexistent > these days --- Norman started a version 3 reimplementation in Lua in > 1999, but it didn't seem to go anywhere. A re-implementation in Ruby > would be nice. See: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~nr/noweb/ > > regards, > andrew > > -- > Andrew L. Johnson http://www.siaris.net/ > The generation of random numbers is too > important to be left to chance.