A source extractor for lightweight literate programming |  |
A source extractor for lightweight literate programming | |
Table of Contents
litsource scriptlitsource program
itselfprocessFile: Process one input file
class ArticleHandler: The
customized content handlerArticleHandler.__init__():
ConstructorArticleHandler.startElement(): Observe a start tagArticleHandler.characters(): Observe text contentArticleHandler.endElement(): Observe an end tagPrograms must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. | ||
| -- Structure and interpretation of computer programs, Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, p. xvii | ||
By literate programming, we mean programs that are intended to be readable. The idea comes from Dr. Donald E. Knuth and has a long history. For background, see the Literate Programming web site.
Knuth's cweb system interwove
narrative about the program with the actual source code of
the program. One then runs a tool named
ctangle to generate the source code,
an a different tool named cweave to
generate the online documentation.
The present effort was inspired by similar efforts of Dr. Allan M. Stavely, who suggested using DocBook as a general framework for literate programming. Refer to Writing documentation with DocBook-XML 4.2 for more information on DocBook.
Stavely's idea was to use DocBook's existing
programlisting element to hold the
program fragments, adding a
role='executable' attribute to that
element to distinguish executable source code from other
uses of the programlisting element.
This means that the regular processing of DocBook into HTML
and PDF forms becomes the new equivalent of Knuth's
cweave step.
The remaining half of the problem, the extraction of the executable code from the DocBook source file, is the subject of this document.
This document is available in Web form and also as a PDF document. See also the executable Python source and the XML source of this document.