Menu ▾ ▴

Home

Simon Wright

nuweb.py is a reimplementation in Python of a subset of the Literate Programming tool nuweb.

I've been frustrated by trying to fix problems in nuweb. It can be really hard to work out how to make a change - for example, how to fix bug 2965157 - if it is indeed a bug!

Part of this is down to the fact that nuweb is implemented in C, but I think that mostly it's because we developers haven't treated it as a proper Literate Programming project. There ought to be some explanation of why (referring to 2965157 again) there's a scrap reference inside the parameter list. I think (from discussion on the nuweb-users mailing list) that it was deliberate, but I see no clue as to the intention.

As another problem (far from the only one!), what is a block comment?

Anyway, to scratch this itch I've been reworking nuweb in Python (nuweb.py).

So far, the parts implemented (you may like to refer to the nuweb User Guide [PDF]) are:

  • files (@o and @O, but no flags)
  • fragments (@d and @D, but no flags)
  • scraps (delimited by @{ and @} only)
  • user-defined identifiers
  • old-style fragment parameters
  • indices @f, @m and @u (I've laid @u out a little differently)
  • @% (anywhere in the document, not just in scraps)
  • @# (put code line at left margin)
  • @@ handling (this one was tricky, and I may not have caught all the cases)
  • switch -r (generate hyperlinks), aliased --hyperlinks.

It won't handle the current nuweb.w, because that web uses new-style parameters. However, it will process it and generate LaTeX. nuweb.w reveals one shortcoming in the Python version, which is that it's slow at processing user-defined identifiers. It takes 8s on this Macbook Pro to process nuweb.w, against 0.07s for the C version. The fix for this (if it's worth it; the other webs I have take about a second overall, which isn't very painful) may be to implement the string search which nuweb.w uses, though a quick trial of acora suggests that a pure Python implementation will be slower than the current re-based implementation in nuweb.py.

So why haven't I written nuweb.py as a web? I suppose the answer is, that I've been exploring the problem while writing the code, which doesn't seem to be a very "literate" approach. Now that the overall structure is reasonably clear, maybe it can be webified. That would at least force me to provide some user-oriented documentation!