Re: DRY way to insert source code into an article?

--- In [email protected], "John Hughes" <john.hughes@...> wrote:
>
> 
> 
> 
>   Hi all,
> 
>   I'm starting to write articles about programming and I'd like to
>   include source code snippets into my article. My strategy was to get
>   the source code examples working, then annotate sections of code which
>   should be imported into the body of the article. The goal here was to
>   avoid copy-paste problems of putting incorrect or stale source code
>   examples into the document.
> 
>   How do other pragmatists approach this problem? 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>    .
> 
> I generally use a very simple home-grown tool generating LaTeX or
HTML (I like to tweak!). Whether I put LaTeX in the comments in my
source code, or source code in my LaTeX for extraction by my tool,
depends on the kind of document I'm writing.
> 
> Something I've found very useful when doing this with Haskell is to
build in the ability to run examples while rendering the document.
When I include an example in the text, it's automatically compiled and
run, and the output pasted back into the document, every time the
document is generated. I've found many, many mistakes because the
example output was actually an error message!
> 
> Haskell's "calculator"-style interface makes this particularly easy
to do, but I'm sure you could adapt the idea to Java.
> 
> John Hughes
>
Haskell (at least in some versions) has some built-in support for
literate programming, and many public examples are written in this
style.  See http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Literate_programming
for some explanation of what's commonly available.  You'd still have
to do some work to get it to html though.

Since TeX has been discussed as a tool that can be used for part of
this process,it's also worth noting that TeX itself is written in a
literate programming system called WEB created by Donald Knuth, which
essentially is preprocessed into TeX for documentation and into a
"normal" programming language (originally Pascal, but I think there
are other options now) for execution.

http://tex.loria.fr/litte/knuthweb.pdf contains a description of this
system and a smallish example.

Knuth's WEB had no html support as it predates the other web. ;-)  
But there are also tools for converting TeX to html.

It might take a bit of work to get something like this together for or
in Java, but it certainly sounds like an interesting idea.

-- 
Don Roby <[email protected]>