From Newsgroup: news.announce.newgroups

REPLACEMENT MODERATOR FOUND
comp.programming.literate

The Big-8 Management Board is pleased to announced that Edward McGuire
has volunteered to moderate the newsgroup comp.programming.literate.

We are informed that the group's last known active moderator, Norman
Ramsey, had resigned some years ago.

The new moderator has already taken over duties and the group has been accepting new posts since March 25, 2024, as evidenced in article <slrnv03mp5.vvu.metaed@newjersey.metaed.com>.


MODERATOR INFO: comp.programming.literate

Moderator: Edward McGuire
Article submission address: cpl@newjersey.metaed.com
Moderation team contact: cpl-board@newjersey.metaed.com
Technical team contact: cpl-admin@newjersey.metaed.com


CHARTER: comp.programming.literate

A forum for the discussion of literate programming.

(1) To share ideas, questions, experiences, and knowledge about
the reading and writing of literate programs or more generally
the presentation of code for human readers (e.g., prettyprinting).

(2) To discuss the merits of the currently existing literate-
programming and related tools.

(3) To discuss the design of new literate-programming and related
tools.


Moderation Policies:

Any posting that bears a plausible relationship to literate
programming is welcome. For example, discussion may include
techniques for prettyprinting code or other techniques for documenting
design or code.

Advertising of tools or services related to literate programming
(e.g., offers to review programs for pay) is considered acceptable.
Other advertising is unacceptable.

Moderation will primarily be automatic, by robo-moderator.
Submissions from regular contributors will be accepted immediately,
without human intervention. The human moderators will examine other submissions; any submission that conforms to the newsgroup charter
will be accepted, and the person making the submission will be added
to the list of regular contributors (whose posts are automatically
accepted). In the unlikely event that a regular contributor sends a
number of off-topic posts, that person will be notified by a moderator
and removed from the list of regular contributors. The exact number
of such posts required to trigger this action is left to the good
judgement of the moderators. The moderators will continue to accept
on-topic posts from such persons; no person is ever to be prohibited
from posting articles deemed acceptable under this charter.

Background:

The rest of this section presents some background information to help
people identify what topics are related to literate programming.

In an article published in _The Computer Journal_ 27 (1984), 97-111,
Donald E. Knuth proposed a "literate" programming style:

I believe that the time is ripe for significantly better
documentation of programs, and that we can best achieve this by
considering programs to be works of literature. Hence, my title:
"Literate Programming."

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of
programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct
a *computer* what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining
to *human beings* what we want a computer to do.

The practitioner of literate programming can be regarded as an
essayist, whose main concern is with exposition and excellence of
style. Such an author, with thesaurus in hand, chooses the names
of variables carefully and explains what each variable means. He
or she strives for a program that is comprehensible because its
concepts have been introduced in an order that is best for human
understanding, using a mixture of formal and informal methods that
reinforce each other.

There is reasonable (but not unanimous) consensus that a
literate-programming system can be characterized by the following
properties:

- The compilable program and the publishable documentation should be
generated *automatically* from a *single* source.

- The program can be presented in the order that is best for human
understanding, regardless of any requirements of the programming
language.

- The program should be automatically indexed and cross-referenced.

- The program may be formatted or prettyprinted in a way that makes
it especially readable.

Existing literate-programming systems support a wide range of
programming languages and documentation systems. Specialized tools
have been written for Ada, Awk, C, C++, Fortran, Modula-2, Modula-3,
Pascal and Scheme, and there are language-independent tools exist that
support almost any programming language (including Perl, sh, and
make). Documentation systems supported include HTML, TeX, Troff, and
Word for Windows.


DISTRIBUTION:

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CHANGE HISTORY:

2024-03-28 Announcement
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Usenet Big-8 Management Board
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