Re: DOM and SAX parsing in Ada

[Nick Roberts <nick.roberts@acm.org>]

Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@user1.uni-duisburg.de> wrote:

> I vaguely remember a discussion of literate programming a few years ago.
> One argument was that practical systems weren't present.

Well, practical systems certainly are present, and available freely. I think
one good source is:

   http://www.literateprogramming.com/

But most of these systems do suffer from the impracticality of requiring, in
general, a 'tangle' of the entire project in order to test any member
program after code changes have been made (however tiny) to any part of it.

Some systems do offer an 'untangle' facility, permitting changes made to the
'source' files (which are non-original in a traditional literate programming
system) to be merged back into the source document files (which are the
canonical originals). But this approach has certain dangers, and makes the
overall system very complex.

I'm developing a 'reverse tangle' tool which takes this idea to the logical
extreme of restoring the source code files back to their status as original
files (intended to be edited by humans). This means that code changes can be
made, and programs rebuilt and tested, using the traditional tool/IDE cycle
(no need for any tangling). Reverse tangling is required when formatting the
documentation, and the only literate programming tool required is the
reverse tangle tool, which is way much simpler.

-- 
Nick Roberts