Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: Literate programming

[Ralf Hemmecke]

Hello Ed,

I tend to agree with Martin (and you). The main goal of Axiom-developers 
should be to get the mathematics right. Programming tools for speeding 
up the "Mathematics goal" is just here since there are not so many good 
tools around for our purpose. If there are people (like you probably) 
who want to speed up the development process of the tools, then just 
fine. Do it!

I hope you then still keep programming and re-programming the things in 
C if I need a little modification of the tool since it does not exactly 
meet my goals. I could not do it myself, since I am much more fluent in 
Perl than in C and thus would spent ages in achieving the same thing in C.

Actually, I don't quite understand Tim with his problem with noweb.

Tim> First, noweb is slow. my current document (for
Tim> work) has about 60k bytes so far. it takes about
Tim> 20 seconds to make a change, save it, and then run
Tim> the makefile to extract the code, run the test
Tim> cases, and update the dvi file.
Tim>
Tim> of the 20 seconds about 18 are spent in noweb. it
Tim> is not scaling.

Obviously, Tim doen't use the ICON version of noweb. (Why?)
And I have the suspicion that the latex process is so fast, since the 
text does not involve many hyperlinks. (But I maybe wrong.)

For example, in order to get the documentation of ALLPROSE 
(http://www.hemmecke.de/aldor) into a stable form one has to call
latex, bibtex, makeindex, latex, makeindex, latex, makeindex, latex
(of course calling latex once would suffice if previous .aux files are 
taken into account). But on my machine, I have the impression that latex 
is much slower compared to the time that is needed by noweb.

If someone wants to make noweb faster, fine, but please keep ALL its 
functionalities AND its flexibility. Yes, noweb offers a feature to 
hyperlink names in code chunks. (See it in work in ALLPROSE.)

Ralf


On 05/22/2006 03:57 PM, Martin Rubey wrote:
> "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > I'm in violent agreement in principle -- anything that depends on "awk"
> > and "sed" (and pipes and the shell) needs to be re-implemented. The
> > question is, "In what language should the re-implementation take place?"
>
> I disagree. I think we should concentrate on our main business. Note that we
> (Ralf and me) are in *desperate* need for a better interpreter. If that
> interpreter is not going to happen, we are going to continue in Aldor. 
>
> Martin