2001-04-07 09:57:20 +02:00
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Literate programming has been introduced by D. E. Knuth in 1984. The
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main idea is to put the code and its documentation in the same file
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and to produce from it a document which is readable by a human, and
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not only by a machine. Although ocamlweb borrows a lot of ideas from
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Knuth's original tool (called WEB), there are big differences between
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them. First, WEB allows you to present the pieces of your code in any
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order, and this is quite useful when using poorly structured
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languages, like Pascal or C. But Objective Caml is already highly
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structured, and this is no more useful. Moreover, WEB requires the use
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of a tool to produce the code from the WEB file, which greatly
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complicates the use of your favorite source-based tools (dependencies
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generator, debugger, emacs mode, etc.). When using ocamlweb, the
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documentation is inserted in the code as comments (in the Caml sense),
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and your code is not linked to the existence of ocamlweb in any way.
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Currently, the task of ocamlweb may be seen as:
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1. making a nice document with the code and its documentation;
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2. generating a global index of cross-references, where each identifier
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is associated to the lists of sections where it is defined or used.
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2001-11-21 00:49:34 +01:00
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WWW: http://www.lri.fr/~filliatr/ocamlweb/
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