http://www.literateprogramming.com/noweb_hacker.pdf
This came in handy when I wanted syntax highlighting in a woven document.
http://www.literateprogramming.com/noweb_hacker.pdf
This came in handy when I wanted syntax highlighting in a woven document.
The first plus was, as you point out, the extensibility of noweb, the pipeline architecture, which transforms the literate input into a documented plain text token stream, then does token stream transformation where you can insert your own transformations, like indexing, syntax highlighting, macro expansions if you wished, and then it reassembles the transformed token stream into output documents.
the other brilliant idea was to go for a minimalistic literate syntax and be language agnostic, for both the markup and the programming language.
This design decision was a focus on the absolute bare minimum, the gist of literate programming, and it still was open to all magic via user plug ins.
This decision also made noweb trivial to learn.
However. How noweb then chose to move to "icon" as scripting and extension language escapes me.
In my book, that was the design decision that killed it. And the rewrite to noweb3, lua based, remained in eternal 'beta'.
and LP as a whole always struggled with IDE / editor support.
literate programming as a discipline could resurrect with the advent of language server protocol. that might make literate programming accessible to contemporary IDEs again.