Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!uwvax!natasha.cs.wisc.EDU!zvr
From: zvr@natasha.cs.wisc.EDU (Alexios Zavras)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: cweb
Keywords: web, C, troff
Message-ID: <9730@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 12 Feb 90 21:03:35 GMT
References: <9676@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu
Reply-To: zvr@natasha.cs.wisc.EDU (Alexios Zavras)
Organization: University of Wisconsin - Computer Sciences Department
Lines: 41

Some days ago I asked the net about the cweb program.
Here's all revelant information.

``Human Factors and Typography for More Readable Programs,''
by Ronald M. Baecker and Aaron Marcus.
[It's an ACM Press edition, published by Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-10745-7]
They are describing ``SEE,'' a visual compiler. It's extremely unfortunate
that they say: ``Because our prototype is so fragile, we regretfully
cannot make it available to other investigators.'' :-(
In the section on ``Literate Programming'' they refer to Knuth's WEB,
but they also mention on a footnote ``Cweb (Thimbleby 1986), a WEB-like
system that deals with C rather than Pascal and uses troff rather than
TeX.'' The reference given is: Thimbleby, H. ``Experiences of Literate
Programming using Cweb (a variant of Knuth's WEB),'' The Computer
Journal 29(3), 201-211.
*That* was the program I was asking about.

I got the cweb that is available for anonymous ftp from princeton.edu.
It looks like the original web, but is intended to be used with C and
not with Pascal. It still uses TeX, of course. So, that was *NOT* what
I was looking for. (thanks anyway).

Two more pointers to similar products (again, NOT the one I wanted :-):
Spiderweb (also on princeton.edu). It's based on cweb, but it's more
easily extended to other languages.

I was also pointed to the web2c in uunet.uu.net. As far a I know that's
the first way there was to convert a WEB document into C (instead of
Pascal), so that TeX would compile on some Unix machines.

    The mysterious cweb remains undiscovered.

Thanks to all who responded,

-- zvr --
    +---------------------------+	Alexios Zavras
    | H eytyxia den exei enoxes |	zvr@cs.wisc.edu
    +-----------------------zvr-+	zavras@cs.wisc.edu
Wisconsin: land of Orson Welles, Frank Lloyd Wright,
		   Harry Houdini  and Spencer Tracy
	       (of Joe McCarthy, too, but try to forget that)