OT: announcement: FriCAS-1.0.0 release

Rainer Joswig <joswig@xxxxxxx> writes:

Question: does anybody still like/use literate programming?
Here with noweb?

Yes, I do. In fact, that's the only bit that keeps me from embracing FriCAS.
For other reasons, I cannot follow the old Axiom project, nor OpenAxiom. A
strange situation, really.

Cons:

* creates static documentation, batch run
I don't understand this one.
* all text files no longer have their native extension
I don't care about that one.
* confuses the text editor (highlighting)
mmm-mode is your friend
* makes the build more complicated
* makes the use of automated tools more complicated
Waldek said this too. Since I don't know anything about build, I follow Waldek
here. Since I'm a mathematician, I spend most of my time with the algebra, so
personally I care only about that one.
* doesn't use the 'native' documentation features
of the language and its development environments
In the particular case at hand, that's only half-true. My personal goal was to
convince people to use ALLPROSE, which is a tool developed by Ralf Hemmecke,
mainly intended for documentation of Aldor. There, we use some (roughly three
or four) additional LaTeX commands, one of which creates the docstrings for
users only interested in applying the package.

As an example, you can look at

http://www.risc.uni-linz.ac.at/people/hemmecke/AldorCombinat/

which only shows the complete documentation, though.

Classicaly literate programming means that code is split into little snippets
and mixed with documentation.

I also think that that's the wrong approach - most of the time. But I like to
use it if I found a bug in old code, do not have the time or expertise to
rewrite it completely, but want to write down my analysis of what it does
(mathematically).

One problem I found is that some things are obvious to some people, others are
obvious to others. Maybe this is less the case with "ordinary" programming, in
mathematics I was often astonished what Waldek found obvious. (I'm into
Combinatorics, Waldek does other things. In particular, I know little about
integration, Waldek does.)

Martin
.