[Axiom-developer] About noweb and literate programming

[daly]

David,

re: recursive chunking

you're assuming that the whole of a function is to be documented
in one long set of paragraphs. this isn't the style used by knuth
in the tex documentation. it also will end up being used everywhere
in axiom because the method of bug fixes uses it. when a piece of
code is fixed i remove the piece of code, replace it with a chunk
name, and add a subsection explaining what the old code did, what
the bug was, and what the new code does.

i've looked at your PDF and it appears that you are doing a 
linear description of the code. with Axiom there is no linear
development of code in a file so your repeated use of the
chunkname (with implicit concatenation) isn't going to carry
over into the axiom domain.

that said (and who doesn't argue about style :-) ) i'm happy
to see that you're using noweb to document your code.

re: noweb

Tim Daly, Jr. is writing a version of noweb in lisp. That way we
can have the same functionality embedded everywhere rather than
just as a preprocessor.

Tim Daly
address@hidden