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Off-the-shelf CL literate programming setup

Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 11:59 pm
by minya
Hello, everyone. Following the recommendation by Joshua Taylor on StackOverflow, I decided to ask my question here. It is as follows:

I would like to know if there is an off-the-shelf Common Lisp literate programming setup for Emacs/SLIME with transparent tangle and weave.
Is there one? What are some viable alternatives, if any? Ideally, I would like to be able to continue using the normal SLIME workflow without
resorting to any build/reload procedures.

As an example of an approach that makes LP unncecessarily complicated: the literate programming process adopted by Tim Daly on Axiom (axiom-developer.org). Tim
writes that he has two windows open, one for Lisp shell and another for the LP system. Once he has finished a piece of code in the Lisp shell, he
pastes the code into the LP window, calls weave and runs all tests on the system to make sure the paste was correct. That's exactly the opposite
of what I'd like: a system transparent to the user, where I don't have to mess around with pieces of text and code. Just write a spec, put the parens
arounds words where suitable, and get both the book and the program.

Also, I'm not sure, but I think this could be cross-posted to the general CL forum. One of the ideas that I had while looking for a solution was to
create a CL DSL to build LP right into the language. That way nothing gets in the way of SLIME (just a bunch of macros that default to evaluating their
contents at REPL-time), but this solution is not terribly elegant as I see it.

Any ideas are appreciated. Thank you.

Re: Off-the-shelf CL literate programming setup

Posted: Mon Feb 17, 2014 6:59 am
by nuntius
Send an email to Alex Plotnick. He has been exploring LP for a good while and even wrote CLWEB.

Tim Daly is the other champion of LP that I can think of (visit axiom-developer.org).