Martin Ruckert

WEB to cweb Martin Ruckert

This book describes a project to convert the TEX source code written by Donald E. Knuth as a WEB into a cweb. A WEB here means a literate program, that is a program which is written as a form of literature and consequently published as a book. Of course there is a way of converting such a piece of literature into an ordinary program: it contains Pascal code. Over the years, the support for Pascal as a major programming language decreased and Pascal was replaced by C as the system programming language of choice. Consequently, WEB was replaced by cweb, leading to the obvious question: can we convert the TEX source code to cweb. And the answer is: yes and no. No, because TEX is a rather large program, so it is not feasible to translate it manually, and translating literature by means of an automatic process is not feasible either. Yes, because the program contained in this book, a literate program itself, is specifically tailored to the TEX source code and achieves a good approximation to such a translation.