> Ah that sounds interesting too! Immediately I start thinking in terms like > tidlywiki http://tiddlywiki.com/ or something similar, I guess the emacs way > described earlier also would support this. I personally always enjoy reading > the readthedocs stuff http://docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ is that the > sort of stuff you mean?
Tiddlywiki is interesting, but I'm really talking about the way LP was used by Knuth WEB/CWEB in his explanation of TeX and METAFONT. The Wikipedia article explains it pretty well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming) You write a document combining documentation and code. Then two different programs (weave and ? for WEB) create the resulting documentation for one (HTML, pdf, whatever) and the code (a .d file) for another. I discovered LP through the incredible book "Physically-based Ray-Tracing". The book is one program, explained and documented using literate progamming. It's an incredible achievement (1000+ pages of explanations!). See: www.pbrt.org and more precisely: http://www.pbrt.org/chapters/pbrt_chapter7.pdf The code begins at page 18 of the pdf. For example, at page 22: <Sample Method Definitions> ≡ Sample::Sample(SurfaceIntegrator *surf, VolumeIntegrator *vol, const Scene *scene) { surf->RequestSamples(this, scene); vol->RequestSamples(this, scene); <Allocate storage for sample pointers 301> <Compute total number of sample values needed 302> <Allocate storage for sample values 302> } The snippet <Sample Method Definitions> introduces three new snippets, that will be explained elsewhere. Other snippets might also use the same references, if needed. It's not complicated to write a D tool for that, I did that some time ago. Once you define your begin/end token for snippet definitions, you can parse them to extract the way they are linked.
