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[29] Do FWEB files necessarily have to be monolithic?

[Later, this item might move to the general FAQ by David B. Thompson]

Archive-Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1992 16:16:50 CST

There is no real support for multiple source files under FWEB. What some might like to see is a solution similar to the one presented by Cameron Smith in his KR-CWEB-SAMPLE distribution. He had to hack CWEB's cwebmac.sty to get a neat table of contents and a combined index distinguishing between entries from different source files [in fact, `KR-CWEB-SAMPLE' illustrates many more things, all more or less related to breaking up a literate C program into multiple source files]. For illustration, this is how the table of contents should look like (sample from Cameron's files):

source module 1: main         Sect Page
introduction..................1.1  1.1

main pgm......................1.4  1.2

index.........................1.10 1.4


source module 2: getop

introduction..................2.1  2.1    etc.

while entries of the combined index are separated like

Index for source module 1: main
...

Index for source module 2: getop

...

...


Sections in source module 1: main

<case for newlines 9> used in section 4...

...

For FWEB, the inclusion of files using `@i' is a partial solution [M-11-13] to avoid having to put all the source code in one file. So far, nobody has presented a solution in Cameron's spirit.

This feature is put on JAK's list of possible future enhancements. It is not in 1.30a, though. Note that CWEB has got an @i option, too (although FWEB's is somewhat more general).

Yet another approach (not limited to FWEB) is the use of a smart editor like GNU Emacs, combined with a smart tool like web-mode which is effectively hiding many of the mischiefs of monolithic source files from the programmer. (see Question 18).