We're sorry but this page doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue.
Feedback

Thirty years of literate programming and more?

Formal Metadata

Title
Thirty years of literate programming and more?
Title of Series
Part Number
27
Number of Parts
35
Author
License
CC Attribution - NoDerivatives 2.0 UK: England & Wales:
You are free to use, copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Identifiers
Publisher
Release Date
Language
Production PlaceSan Francisco, California, USA

Content Metadata

Subject Area
Genre
Abstract
Don Knuth created Literate Programming about thirty years ago. It could be called a methodology, discipline, paradigm, … Bentley’s “Programming Pearls” article about Knuth’s book, TEX: The Program, caused a huge stir in the computing professions. Soon there was announcement of a Literate Programming section for the CACM. There then appeared a number of “Literate Programming systems”. The use of the term Literate Programming is often applied to systems that have few of the characteristics of Knuth’s WEB. There are at least two systems that are still in use that are quite faithful to the philosophy that Knuth elucidated in his original Pascal based WEB system: CWEB and FWEB. These support at least three languages each. Most other systems are relatively independent of language. I will propose a definition for Literate Programming that will be used in my comments about some of these systems. I will also discuss some items from my archives (or memory) about this and related subjects. Some come from teaching the freshman year of computer science using literate programming.