Re: Issues with literate programming DSSSL Script

[MARK.WROTH@xxxxxxxxxxx (Wroth, Mark)]

Continuing the conversation on literate programming, Brandon Ibach
<bibach@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> commented

Quoting Wroth, Mark <MARK.WROTH@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
> BI>    As far as writing by hand, I guess it's just something to get used
> BI> to.  Any language has things like this that you need to learn.  I
> BI> wrote C for years, faithfully surrounding my strings with
> BI> double-quotes, only to have to learn to use single-quotes, instead,
> BI> when I started doing a lot of SQL.  And every now and then, I throw
> BI> myself a real curve ball when Postscript makes me use parens for
> BI> strings. :)
> 
> That's essentially why I was willing to declare victory when I was able to
> set up entities &lt;, &gt;, and &amp; that got the desired characters into
> the output; all literate programming systems have this basic problem
> (usually on the character "@", since that's what Knuth chose in the
original
> WEB).
> 
   Actually, the best I've seen in this regard would be Javadoc, which
has the programmer embed the documentation in specially-formatted
comments, thus requiring no special tricks in writing the code, and
requiring no pre-parsing of the code before compilation.  Not the best
thing to hear from an SGML maven, though, eh?  :P

If I correctly understand what Javadoc does, LaTeX has a mode like this also
(called 'doc'), intended for documenting LaTeX class and style files.  But
unless I'm missing something, it does not have a mechanism for re-ordering
the input in the "tangle" phase (which is essentially non-existent with this
approach).  With some languages this is not a serious problem (DSSSL, for
example). But I would have thought that it was an issue for Java.


 DSSSList info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dssslist