When I first gave a serious look at literate programming, I felt that what Knuth & co. could (should) have done to best demonstrate it is to write a program to describe/output the PKZIP file format. The CWEB sources themselves might be good and all, but most examples of literate programming I've looked at, including (and especially) the infamous article opposite McIlroy, don't really do anything for me. I checked around, thinking that surely someone realized this and that it must exist, but I didn't turn up anything. It's the same today, as far as I know. (I did find a DEFLATE implementation in JS run through one of those documentation tools that purports to produce a literate program, but it's not a literate program in the sense that Knuth uses the term.)
http://www.commandlinefanatic.com/cgi-bin/showarticle.cgi?ar...
The author has a three-part set of articles about Knuth and reading The Art of Computer Programming:
http://www.commandlinefanatic.com/cgi-bin/showarticle.cgi?ar...
When I first gave a serious look at literate programming, I felt that what Knuth & co. could (should) have done to best demonstrate it is to write a program to describe/output the PKZIP file format. The CWEB sources themselves might be good and all, but most examples of literate programming I've looked at, including (and especially) the infamous article opposite McIlroy, don't really do anything for me. I checked around, thinking that surely someone realized this and that it must exist, but I didn't turn up anything. It's the same today, as far as I know. (I did find a DEFLATE implementation in JS run through one of those documentation tools that purports to produce a literate program, but it's not a literate program in the sense that Knuth uses the term.)