A source extractor for lightweight literate programming

If you are using the Unix make utility to build your document and source files, you can add lines to your Makefile to take care of building the program source files.

First, in the part of your Makefile that defines variables, define a variable named CODE_TARGET that contains the name of the source file you want to build. If you are building multiple source files, any of them will work. For instance, if your source file is called run.c, the rule would look like this:

CODE_TARGET     =  run.c

Then, in the rules part of your Makefile, add this rule:

code: $(CODE_TARGET)

$(CODE_TARGET): $(TARGET).xml
        litsource $<

Make sure that the last line starts with an actual tab character.

Here's one more refinement. Suppose you are generating an executable script in some scripting language like Perl or Python, and you need to make that script executable under Unix. Assume further that the script's name is in the $(CODE_TARGET) variable. You can automate making the script executable with a rule like this:

$(CODE_TARGET): $(TARGET).xml
        litsource $<; \
        chmod +x $(CODE_TARGET)