Re: [Texmacs-dev] literate programming

[Felix Breuer]

On Fri, 2006-07-14 at 14:22 +0200, Rein van den Boomgaard wrote:
> Dear All
> 
> i'm using Texmacs quite often nowadays but often i switch to latex+noweb
> for programming. I;ve read some posts on LP for Texmacs but it is
> unclear to me what the status is. I read the great plans to make it into
> a two way process (code <--> doc). That sounds great although i'm not
> used to that using noweb. So i would greatly appreciate a "doc-->code"
> LP mode for texmacs. 
> 
> Is there such a program? I think Felix Breuer announced it once??

Hello Rein,

yes, there is such a program. It does work but you will have to run some
shell commands to generate code. There is no menu entry, keyboard
shortcut, etc, and hence it was never included in the TeXmacs
distribution. You can get it from:

  http://files.felixbreuer.net/LP4TeXmacs-0.1.tar.gz


As to what its status is: The code is from March 2005. It should work
but I am not actively using it, so I don't know how ready it is for
"production" use. During the process of converting it into a proper
plugin for inclusion in TeXmacs I noticed that while debugging I found
it much more convenient to make changes in the source code instead of in
the docs. Making the mechanism two way turned out to be too much effort,
given the present concept.

At that point (early 2006) I announced the status of my work to the ML
again. David Mentre had the great idea of serializing TeXmacs documents
as source code with the document as comments. Nothing would ever have to
be generated, the TeXmacs document in the serialized form would simply
*be* the source code. David and I progressed pretty far with the
specification of the system. David began working on a stand-alone Scheme
script to do the conversion, but he did not finish it and I did not have
the time to help him. He does not plan to continue working on this
project.

The future: I think, the best thing would be to implement the two-way
mechanism (along the spec David and I drafted on the ML) as an
import/export filter (save/load hook, de/serializer,
whatever-you-want-to-call-it) for TeXmacs itself. It should be easy to
do. Unfortunately I am too busy with my diploma thesis at the moment to
do any programming (let alone digging into the TeXmacs API :)


So, if the one-way implementation linked above works for you, you are
welcome to use and modify it! In particular, if the associated
stylesheet is not to your liking the whole system should be easy to
adapt to a different one. If you have questions, please ask.

If anybody is interested in the two-way project and has some time to
spare, just speak up and join the team. I could write up a short summary
of the long discussions David and I had.


Regards,
Felix