The CWEB System of Structured Documentation

See also NOWEB, a system that developed the ideas of CWEB. Wrote my dissertation using it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.tufts.edu&#x2F;~nr&#x2F;noweb&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.tufts.edu&#x2F;~nr&#x2F;noweb&#x2F;</a>

I studied CWEB when I did computer science in the early 1990s (eek!).<p>While it is a way to document and compile your programs from a single file, it still contains the problem of where the story of a program should happen, and in keeping the documentation and code in line and up to date with each other.<p>It should also be understood that the documentation is for other programmers and not users, since the printout of the document includes the code in-line.

CWEB spawned several other Literate Programming systems, the main differences being in programming languages supported as well as how the documentation was formatted.<p>My favorite is nuweb <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nuweb.sourceforge.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nuweb.sourceforge.net&#x2F;</a> which allows for LP in virtually any language and provides documentation in LaTeX. The main trade off being that with wide language support the code sections are as-is, without special formatting. Since mostly people write the code sections to their own tastes already this is not a significant problem.

I find it surprising that nobody talked about Jupyter so far. I still think that Jupyter is an overly simplified realisation of cweb&#x27;s vision.

isn&#x27;t the first problem of documentation is keeping it in sync with the source code? Time and time again people come up with &quot;better ways of documentation&quot; while neglecting this basic problem, what problem do they think they&#x27;re solving?