On 2021-11-06 11:12, Matthew Knepley did write:
> On Sat, Nov 6, 2021 at 10:34 AM Patrick Sanan <patrick.sanan@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I don't know what WEB is, but if you're saying that this is kinda clunky,
> > yes it definitely is - my only contention is that it's better than
> > copy-pasting code and output. I'm not sure if there's an easier and/or
> > better way with Sphinx.
> >
>
> WEB was the futuristic documentation idea of Don Knuth.
>
It never caught on (for good reasons IMO), but it is important
historically and programmers should be aware of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
Threadjack:
My major problem with WEB was that it in essence assumed that everything was One Big Source File.
I tried documenting parts of PETSc with it in the 90s and I found that it did not perform as well as sowing
because it really wanted one gigantic control flow, just like the algorithms Knuth was presenting. Maybe
a combination of sowing and Web could bridge the gap.
Thanks,
Matt
For those who love literate programming and fortran, PPPL developed this
in the 80's:
https://w3.pppl.gov/~krommes/fweb.html
and I believe it is still maintained.
I dealt with a code written with this tool. Interesting, but I never
wanted to follow it myself.
Scott
> Thanks,
>
> Matt
>
>
> >
> >> Doing actual literate documentation of key tutorial programs would be a
> >> nice way of doing this, but I realise that's a lot more effort.
> >>
> > This is still a hope/plan to go into doc/tutorials - follow the deal.ii
> > model for a small number of key examples. Matt has done a couple of pages
> > there already, in this direction.
> >
> > Lawrence
> >
> >
>
> --
> What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
> experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their
> experiments lead.
> -- Norbert Wiener
>
> https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~knepley/ <http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~knepley/>
--
Scott Kruger
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