Incremental redocumentation using literate programming

The primary aim of this research is to investigate means of improving program comprehension through redocumentation. In particular it will concentrate on using Literate Programming as a method for program redocumentation. Documentation is crucially important as an aid to understanding software systems. The Incremental Redocumentation Using Literate Programming System analyses the existing source code and merges in a range of other information, in order to create a complete documentation package. This may include not only traditional paper documents, but also hypertext facilities, animated specifications and output from other analysis tools. The status of the documentation is implicitly elevated to that of an integral part of the system, rather than an optional extra. Where a configuration management system is used to manage different versions of a system, the documentation can also be brought under its control. The literate programming paradigm provides the encouragement and capability to produce high quality code and documentation simultaneously. Conceptually, literate programming systems are document preparation systems. The primary goal of a literate program is to be understandable to the programmers who are going to have to read it at some later date - often while involved in maintenance, or perhaps when trying to determine the possibility of reusing parts of the code for later projects. This thesis presents a structures of C programs and literate C programs, and describes the features of captured literate C programs. A method of the capture process and also the functions of the redocumentation process are described. In addition, this thesis outlines how the individual stages in the capture process and the edit process are used to redocument a C program. The results of application of the process are highlighted by way of example programs. The evaluation process is performed by comparing the results of an existing literate program with those resulting from the application of the method described within this thesis. The results have shown that the captured redocumented literate C program is more readable and understandable than source code only, and that it provides a basis for subsequent maintenance and further redocumentation

Measuring Complexity and Stability of Web Programs�

Software maintenance engineers spend at least half of their time trying to understand the system they are to modify. This is due partially to the fact that often the only documentation available is the source code itself. The literate programming paradigm provides the incentive and the capability to produce high quality documentation and code simultaneously. The goal is to create "works of literature" which have all the extras (table of contents, cross references, and indices) to help readers to comprehend the programs quickly and thoroughly. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the similarities and differences in measurements of complexity and stability of literate programs compared to those of traditionally developed code.Computer Scienc

A tool for publishing reproducible algorithms & A reproducible, elegant algorithm for sequential experiments

Tools to ease the burden of reproducibility are important so computer science does not fall into the trap of "cargo cult" science: particularly publishing discussions of algorithms that look like algorithms but which do not work properly when they are copied from the paper. This paper introduces a tool, called relit, which makes it very easy to write about and publish correct algorithms, yet without restricting the author's style. In fact, relit can be used with any material: mathematics, proofs, algorithms or programs. It can be used in papers, in reports and books and, with analogous advantages, in student work - where examiners may wish to automatically check what the student claims to have written is actually correct.To demonstrate relit, this paper presents a new, elegant algorithm for the design of sequential experiments to efficiently control bias, drift, random error, carry-over and other effects. The algorithm is written in C, in a clear style to simplify porting to other languages. We developed relit because it was impossible to find simple reproducible code for this problem, and we wanted to do better. Thanks to relit, the published algorithm is reproducible and works exactly as published in the present paper. This paper also includes discussion of the problems and opportunities of reproducibility and the essential contributions of relit-style approaches to improving the reliability of computer science publications

AOPS : an abstraction oriented programming system for literate programming

The practice of literate programming is not widespread because existing literate programming systems have some undesirable characteristics such as programming language and text processor dependence and lack of flexible tools for viewing and manipulation of the source file. This dissertation describes the literate programming system AOPS (Abstraction Oriented Programming System) which addresses both of these problems. AOPS is programming language and text processor independent literate programming system. AOPS tools include a hypertext browser, a lister with the ability to select what is presented and what is suppressed, and a filter to extract the program code from the AOPS source file. AOPS introduces the notion of a phantom abstraction that enhances the understandability of the literate program and when used in conjunction with the browser greatly extends the capabilities of AOPS. We also discuss how the design of AOPS supports extension of the concept of literate programming to encompass the entire software life cycle. Finally we describe an experiment which showed that literate programs contain more documentation than traditional programs

PRINTING COMMON WORDS Moderator’s Introduction to Column 1

Two Programming Pearls columns in 1986 presented literate programs by Donald Knuth. The May 1986 col-umn contained a WEB program to generate a sorted lis