WEB

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This article is about the computer programming system. For the Bible translation, see World English Bible. For other uses, see web.

WEB is a computer programming system created by Donald Knuth as the first implementation of what he called "literate programming": the idea that one could create software as works of literature, by embedding source code inside descriptive text, rather than the reverse (as is common practice in most programming languages), in an order that is convenient for expostition to human readers, rather than in the order demanded by the compiler.

WEB consists of two primary programs: TANGLE, which produces compilable Pascal code from the source texts, and WEAVE, which produces nicely-formatted, printable documentation using TeX.

CWEB is a newer version of WEB for the C programming language.

The most significant programs written in WEB are TeX and metafont. Modern TeX distributions use another program Web2C to convert the TeX program to C.

[edit] References

  • Donald E. Knuth, Literate Programming, Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1992, CSLI Lecture Notes, no. 27.

[edit] External links

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