Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: Literate programming

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

I'm just now starting to do "literate programming", so I haven't had a
chance to run into any performance bottlenecks in "noweb" yet. My
approach has been to use TeXmacs or LyX to edit "literate programs."
While both have native formats, both also can read and write files in
TeX. TeXmacs can also import Axiom (and R and Maxima) sessions directly
-- you can use TeXmacs like you would use Emacs.

The R folks are also committed to literate programming and the concept
of an executable document. They call this a compendium, a rather
unfortunate choice of words to me because there is a "dialogue mapping"
tool of the same name. Some links are

http://www.bepress.com/bioconductor/paper2

and

http://www.bepress.com/bioconductor/paper3/

So ... just how does one "get started" doing literate programming in
Axiom? Suppose, for example, I am working on a queuing theory model and
want to mix equations, data, graphs, etc. in a paper? Curiously enough,
LyX interfaces directly to noweb but not to Axiom and TeXmacs interfaces
directly to Axiom but not to noweb. :)

Ralf Hemmecke wrote:
> 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
>
>

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

http://linuxcapacityplanning.com