Literate Programming Literate Programming Overview Literate Programming is a system of programming pioneered by Donald Knuth that allows one to break programs into small chunks. A bunch of literate programming solutions exist, since there seems to be more interest in writing new literate programming systems than in actually using them. Everyone seems to have an opinion. Knuth's ideas are set forth in an interview , a book , and published programs like the Stanford Graphbase . It is language independent and allows the creation of HTML documentation files automatically.
Most people now use noweb.
I don't use noweb because porting it to the Macintosh was hopeless. In fact, I was unable to get the existing noweb port for the Mac to work. Neither type of language can provide the best documentation by itself. But when both are appropriately combined, we obtain a system that is much more useful than either language separately. There are at least three variants of cweb available .