Literate Programming

Download or read book Literate Programming written by Donald Ervin Knuth and published by Stanford Univ Center for the Study. This book was released on 1992-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literate programming is a programming methodology that combines a programming language with a documentation language, making programs more easily maintained than programs written only in a high-level language. A literate programmer is an essayist who writes programs for humans to understand. When programs are written in the recommended style they can be transformed into documents by a document compiler and into efficient code by an algebraic compiler. This anthology of essays includes Knuth's early papers on related topics such as structured programming as well as the Computer Journal article that launched literate programming. Many examples are given, including excerpts from the programs for TeX and METAFONT. The final essay is an example of CWEB, a system for literate programming in C and related languages. Index included.