4 ms·

Isn't Knuth's CWEB used for C?

• Mikhail_Edoshin 10y ago
  CWEB is for C and the original WEB was for Pascal. (C is a good fit, by the way, because you can use #line directive to make the compiler to report the line numbers in your original literate files instead of the irrelevant line numbers in generated files.) But as far as I remember it still produces a single C file and a single TeX file.
  • e12e 10y ago
    When experimenting with NOWEB and Java (1.3 I believe) I discovered that one of the things that those LP systems did was encourage something like macro based code re-use, somewhat "lifting" the rather basic language up towards something a little more high level. This was good and bad; bad like unhygienic macros can be bad. As far as I could figure out it was a poor match for OO/"inheritance oriented" programming. It was a better match for procedural style programming - "writing C in java" - then the LP "macros" didn't confuse things. But when mixing OO-style java, I found things seemed to become uncomfortably verbose. NOWEB might in some ways be the worst of both worlds - it knows (and cares) nothing about the programming language - but that also means blocks can't be parameterized. This is annoying if you're using variables to hold iterators and state (traversing a graph stored in arrays as edge/node lists etc). You end up with dangerous variable name re-use or code duplication (and too big code blocks).