Literate programming¶
The idea of ‘literate programming’ was invented by Donald Knuth. The concept is quite simple—the decriptions that accompany code should be informative and progress from beginning to end with logical and clearly written text. This is in contrast from the more conventional style of terse commenting used in software development. Another important part of literate programming is that the code embedded within the text should be easily run by the reader, which necessitates the use of working examples.
Notable Software¶
- Python object-oriented scripting language
- Pweave Sweave package for Python
- PyLit package for literate programming in Python using reStructuredText
- pyreport Another package for literate programming in Python
- R software for statistical computing
- Sweave the Sweave package
- Ruby another object-oriented language
- Rubyweb A web-oriented literate programming system
- Sphinx works with Python, C/C++, Ruby, JS and others