Introduction

This little project is an attempt to have a simple implementation of noweb’s features.

The ones I am fond of and I would like to implement/extend are:

• code chunks from any language (and maybe some noweb.el extension to be able to have mode change accordingly)
  • I would like to be able to specify a list of name/value pairs to be used when rendering the doc by the listings LaTeX package. So something like

    <<a piece of Ada code [language=[95]Ada, stepnumber=2]>>=
    with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;
    procedure Hello is
    begin
      Put_Line("Hello, world!");
    end Hello;
    @
            

    would result in something like

    begin{lstlisting}[language={[95]Ada}, stepnumber=2]
    with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;
    procedure Hello is
    begin
      Put_Line("Hello, world!");
    end Hello;
    \end{lstlisting}
            

• weaving and tangling
  • I am not sure yet whether to include some ideas from Pweave
• indexing ala noindex, i.e. with hook for extensibility (pipes?)

Differences with noweb.py

Concatenation of code chunks

The original noweb.py does not support concatenation of code chunks with the same name contrary to noweb’s behaviour, see for example noweb (1) man page.

Allow escaped << or >>

The original noweb.py does not support escaping of << or >> in code chunks contrary to noweb’s behaviour, see for example noweb (1) man page.

Why Python

The selection of Python as programming language is purely practical:

• it is used/known widely
• it is by default installed on Linux distros (contrary to current [Icon] and beta [Lua] version of noweb);
• it is expressive and with batteries included, i.e. a huge/useful amount of libraries.

Acknowledgement

This started as fork from what was developed by Jonathan Aquino: his work has to be acknowledged and praised, see his blog entry.

Inspiration (or maybe not?) from Pweave by Matti Pastel.

Great inspiration from Python by Guido van Rossum.

An immense hug to Alan Kay for inspiring me and let me discover OMeta by Alex Warth.

The design of a system where to run it all, i.e. Unix by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, Joe Ossanna and collegues from Bell labs.

An Unix-based system, i.e. Linux thanks initially to Linus Torvalds and many others later, but also Mac OS X by Steve Jobs & Co.

Last but surely not least, Norman Ramsey for noweb.