noweb – A simple extensible literate programming tool

Noweb is de­signed to meet the needs of lit­er­ate pro­gram­mers while re­main­ing as sim­ple as pos­si­ble. Its pri­mary ad­van­tages are sim­plic­ity, ex­ten­si­bil­ity, and lan­guage-in­de­pen­dence. Noweb uses 5 con­trol se­quences to WEB's 27. The noweb man­ual is only 4 and a bit pages; an ad­di­tional page ex­plains how to cus­tomize its LaTeX out­put. Noweb works “out of the box” with any pro­gram­ming lan­guage, and sup­ports TeX, LaTeX, and HTML back ends. A back end to sup­port full hy­per­text or in­dex­ing takes about 250 lines; a sim­pler one can be writ­ten in 40 lines of awk. Noweb does not pret­typrint na­tively, but sup­ports pret­typrint­ing through such third-party fil­ters as pret­zel and dpp.