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[1] What is FWEB?
For a thorough discussion of the WEB system, I refer to
the extensive literature, collected in Nelson Beebe's
bibliography (at ftp.math.utah.edu in directory
pub/tex/bib).
For pointers, see the General FAQ by Dave Thompson.
The WEB system.
In D.E. Knuth's [author of the original WEB, coauthor of CWEB] own words,
[M-2.3]
``The philosophy behind WEB is that an experienced system programmer,
who wants to provide the best possible documentation of his or her
software products, needs two things simultaneously: a language like TeX
for formatting, and a language like C for programming.*
Neither type of language can provide the best documentation by itself;
but when both are appropriately combined, we obtain a system that is
much more useful than either language separately.
The structure of a software program may be thought of as a web that is
made up of many interconnected pieces. To document such a program we
want to explain each individual part of the web and how it relates to its
neighbours. The typographic tools provided by TeX (1)
give us an opportunity to explain the local structure of each part by
making that structure visible, and the programming tools provided by
languages such as C or Fortran make it possible for us to specify the
algorithms formally and unambigously.
By combining the two, we can develop a style of programming
that maximizes our ability to perceive the structure of a complex
piece of software, and at the same time the documented programs can be
mechanically translated into a working software system that
matches the documentation.''
FWEB - a multilingual WEB variant.
FWEB which is being supported and upgraded by John Krommes is a
substantial extension of CWEB, FWEB supports
C, C++, Fortran, Fortran90, Ratfor, and TeX
i.e. writing TeX macros (style files).
It runs on most platforms: VMS, PC, UNIX, and pretty much anything
that the GNU C compiler (GCC) is supported for.
[Archive-Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1992 18:20:45 CDT]
JAK [M-1]:
``The principal design contributions to this version of WEB are
- 1. the concept of a current language,
so that one can process code written in multiple languages
in the same WEB run;
- 2. new production rules for Fortran, Ratfor, and TeX (and some
modifications of Levy's (2)
rules for C;
- 3. a C-like built-in macro preprocessor;
- 4. the ability to directly translate Ratfor into Fortran.
In addition, many miscellaneous details have been changed and a variety of
convenience features has been added.''
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1)
[which itself is written in Knuth's original Pascal WEB -MS]
(2)
[Levy and Knuth are the authors of the C variant of WEB -MS]