Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: Literate programming

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

I'm in violent agreement in principle -- anything that depends on "awk"
and "sed" (and pipes and the shell) needs to be re-implemented. The
question is, "In what language should the re-implementation take place?"

My gut reaction is that the logical choice is not Lisp but C. Rather
than "awk", "sed" and the shell, their descendents Perl, Python and Ruby
are what people write this sort of code in nowadays. But it's foolhardy
to add a language to Axiom -- how many languages are there already in
the Axiom bill of materials?

Perl, Python and Ruby (and GCL) are all implemented in C. And they all
call upon libraries to do regular expression processing. Why not just
use the libraries in C? Eliminate "awk", "sed" and the pipes, but keep C?

root wrote:
> (note that this part of my reply is copied to the axiom mailing list)
>
>   
>> Would you care to share some insights as to why you are thinking about
>> redoing noweb in lisp?
>>     
>
> five reasons. 
> (well "reasons" might be a bit strong except in a religious sense)
>
>
> first, noweb is slow. my current document (for work) has about 60k
> bytes so far.  it takes about 20 seconds to make a change, save it,
> and then run the makefile to extract the code, run the test cases, and
> update the dvi file.
>
> of the 20 seconds about 18 are spent in noweb. it is not scaling.
>
> noweb uses the old byte-at-a-time model with pipes, awk, sed, etc.
>
> in lisp i'd use read-sequence which can read the whole file in subsecond
> time and the lisp processing won't take much longer. you could use mmap
> in C but that won't work with the C/sed/awk pipe scripts.
>
> axiom source is slowly dissolving into fully literate documents 
> and these documents are getting larger and more complex. we MUST scale.
>
>
>
> second, if lisp could manipulate literate documents directly it would
> greatly increase the ways we could integrate literate documents into
> the interpreter/compiler/browser/graphics. it would be possible to
> directly (read) from a chunk in a file so that program and data files
> don't need to be notangled. which eliminates the need for notangle and
> makes literate documents fundamental.
>
>
>
> third, axiom is mostly lisp. noweb adds requirements for 
> sed/C/[gawk|nawk|awk]. it's been argued that these exist already
> but that's hardly a reason for continuing. a uniform implementation
> language increases function (see above) and reduces developer knowledge 
> requirements. if i can just type (read (find-chunk "chunkname")) it is
> much easier and more useful than starting a separate process to run a
> C/sed/awk function and then opening a stream to read the result.
>
>
>
> fourth, since all of my literate work uses latex it makes sense to 
> limit the noweb functionality to be pure latex. so instead of
> defining a chunk as
>
> <<anything>>=
> @
>
> we would write 
>
> \begin{chunk}{anything}
> \end{chunk}
>
> this would eliminate the noweave step completely. all of the
> power of latex is available. it would be possible to make 
> the chunk-environment sensitive to things like fonts or other 
> latex commands like bold-font, arrays, etc. chunks need not
> be raw quoted code but could include hyperlinks. these could be
> eliminated in the notangle process.
>
>
>
> fifth, i can't leave "good enough" alone. i see axiom growing by
> a factor of 10 or more and i'm constantly gnawing on the problem
> of scaling and integration. unifying chunks and latex with lisp
> gives me a whole new realm of ideas for unifying the idea of 
> literate documents and computational math. 
>
> i want the distinction to disappear. i want computational math to just
> be published as literate documents containing theory and code where
> the running code is considered the "proof". i want the standard of
> academic interchange to require running code much as standard
> mathematics requires a proof. i want a literate journal that referees
> literate computational mathematics papers. (for academics, programs
> are a loss at the moment because they are not considered for tenure)
>
> noweb is a wart on the whole process. it exposes mechanism.
> you should be able to just "run" a computational mathematics paper.
> no mechanism, no machinery. 
>
> it should "just work".
>
> t
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>   

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

http://linuxcapacityplanning.com