[Axiom-developer] size issue with noweb

[root]

The noweb code is beginning to show a weakness.

I'm building a literate program for work. It now has 51785 lines
which format out to 1276 pages.

Every 10 lines of changes or so I save the program, and run a 
makefile that 
  1) extracts the latex
  2) latex the tex file
  3) latex the tex file again (for cross-ref)
  4) extracts the program
  5) compiles the program
  6) extracts the test cases
  7) runs the program on the test cases.

The process takes 20 seconds on a 3.2Ghz processor.
16 of those seconds (80% of the total time) involve noweb.

My program will eventually be a factor of 10 larger
(about 500k lines, 12k pages).

I'm not sure that noweb is up to the task. It clearly cannot scale.
Latex, a MUCH more complex program, swallows my document in one second.
I think it might be time to explore a noweb rewrite.

In particular, I'm beginning to think that we could use latex
syntax for chunks as in:

<<chunkname>>=
  foo
@

becomes

\begin{chunk}[chunkname]
  foo
\end{chunk}

and 

<<chunkname>>

becomes

\chunk{chunkname}

Code could still be extracted with a preprocessor but the 
latex piece would become native latex and could be formatted
by standard latex with only a .sty file. This completely 
eliminates the need for noweave.

Comments?

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