19 Nov
2011
19 Nov
'11
1:31 p.m.
On 19/11/11 3:32 PM, Richard wrote:
The point is that they weren't commonly applied circa TeX's birth. (And
nor does Knuth seem particularly seduced by them since.)
Maybe that is true, but it's not because it's not thoroughly documented
in prose...
Yes. *barf*.
I said those *two books* are outstanding expository pieces of work, but
of course there are other examples of literate programs as well.
Literate programming didn't captivate the mainstream. But you know what?
That's a pretty poor yardstick of quality.
--Toby
In article<4EC7E21F.9030005 at
telegraphics.com.au>,
Toby Thain<toby at telegraphics.com.au> writes:
Yes, and what I said is also correct.
It is written in a augmented version of standard
Pascal [...]
I know. OOP has been around as long as Simula IIRC 1968.
Encapsulation and abstraction have been around for just as long if
not longer.
Whatever your
opinion or disgust at TeX and METAFONT not conforming to
recent idioms,
They aren't recent idioms. these don't seem to have impaired their
reliability,
performance, or sheer longevity: Being the 30-year de facto standard in
academic publishing.
That's because practically noone can understand it besides Knuth, which
is why noone has been changing it. Software that doesn't change
doesn't have bugs introduced into it.
Knuth's attempt at "literate programming", to write a book that
Have you read the book? These are considered outstanding expository
pieces of work, and TeX and
METAFONT hardly lesser.
Yet here we are about 30 years after the fact and only an incredibly
tiny portion (vanishingly small, I'd say) of existing software has
adopted these "outsanding" methods. I'd say the wisdom of crowds has
pretty much ruled this a failure.