[Axiom-developer] Knuth's literate style

[daly]

An interesting reference worth purchasing, checking out from a library,
or stealing from a friend... In any case, it helps to have looked at it
carefully at least once as there are many features here:

Knuth, Donald E. "TEX, The Program" Addison Wesley, 1986
ISBN 0-201-13437-3

It will help set the baseline for a discussion of literate documenation.
This is my current target, modulo using latex-compatible chunk syntax to
eliminate the WEAVE step. 

The stated plan is to have a literate version of the interpreter, the
compiler, the hyperdoc, the graphics and the algebra.



Knuth clearly intended that this be a readable document for someone
interested in TEX. Note that the program has survived and is widely
used despite a thousand other ways to typeset.

The fact that TEX lives is interesting. I used another competing program
call SCRIPT, which was the IBM-sponsored markup language. There have been
many, many others which haven't survived. I believe that the documentation
(and the side benefits of cleaning up the program to publish) is vital.

We've all stated our "positions" on this so I'm not looking for more
restatements. I'm asking for concrete examples of other existing
documentation for other programs so we can "compare and constrast".
Does anyone know of another example of literate programming?
Can we build a biblography of these references?

Tim