Re: Documentation, Literate Programming and the Real World

[Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@...>]

2016-10-06 12:13 GMT+02:00 Sean Conner <sean@conman.org>:

> I never cared for Literate Programming (and I even own _Literate
> Programming_ by Knuth!) because it never seemed appropriate for
> the code I write.

Given your dislike for markup languages, that is simply par for the course.

Actually, I'm only smuggling this post in as a reply but it isn't really.

Literate Programming is definitely documentation of the third kind:
aimed at maintainers.

I used a program called Anansi some years ago, even contributed
a patch that exported documentation to Markdown. Sadly, I no longer
have the skills to install a Hackage (I understand that one should now
use Stack instead), and what is worse, the Anansi author seems to
have given up on his brainchild (last version available as a tarball is
 0.4.8 of a year ago and the repository is on the aouthor's personal
domain which does not accept connections).

I wrote a rather substantial mixed Lua/C program in it. It is rather
like having a preprocessor for Lua. You can define macros, and
it writes out to as many files as you like. There is a slight C flavour
in the terminology but it is essentially code language agnostic.

If I needed to adapt the program, I would probably appreciate the
running start Literate Programming gives you. But I can remember
that at the time I thought its patoff/overhead ration was not very
favourable.