Re: Literate Executables

Hi Tim,

Your observations seem sound.  Keep in mind, however, that we're not 
confronted with an either/or choice.  The chicken/egg aspect of literate 
executables means that, in your context, we can arrange for the PDF to 
generate code *and* for the code to generate PDF.  Cyclic dependency 
graphs take some getting used to, but one can learn to love them.

If literate execution isn't right for Axiom, perhaps it can benefit other 
IBM open source projects.  If you circulate the paper among your 
colleagues I'd be interested to see if they find useful applications.

_Queue_ readers are remarkably creative and routinely find uses for Drill 
Bits ideas that I never anticipated.  I wonder what your colleagues will 
come up with.

Thanks.

-- Terence


On Fri, 2 Dec 2022, Tim Daly wrote:

> ...
> 
> The above considerations leads me to the conclusion that the PDF is the 
> thing that generates code rather than the code generating the PDF.