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<A HREF="compile.html"><FONT COLOR="#FFFFFF">1 Compile</FONT></A><BR>
<A HREF="design.html"><FONT COLOR="#FFFFFF">2 Design</FONT></A><BR>
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<P><FONT SIZE="5">2.2 Motivation For FunnelWeb</FONT><BR>
<P>During 1986, I discovered Donald
Knuth's <SAMP>WEB</SAMP> literate
programming system in the form of Jon
Bentley's <I>Programming
Pearls</I> column in
<I>Communications of
the ACM</I> <STRONG>[Bentley86]</STRONG>. This prompted me to
obtain a copy of the report on the Web
system<STRONG>[Knuth83]</STRONG> and to try out the WEB program.
<P>WEB was the best system that I had seen for producing
printed and online, inline documentation. To me the most
extraordinary aspect of the system was its success despite
the fact that it had been built into the horribly antiquated
file/batch processing systems that we all know and love
(and use). I had imagined sophisticated documentation
systems before this time, but had always assumed that they
would be parts of complex programming environments. Knuth
showed that, to some extent, it can be done using 1960s
software technology (excluding the 1980s typesetting
technology).
<P>The WEB system was enticing and promising, but to me
suffered from many drawbacks, many of which Knuth had
categorized as advantages. The following highly subjective list
of disadvantages formed a springboard for the construction
of FunnelWeb.
<UL>
<LI> WEB can only process Pascal programs.
<LI> WEB can produce only one output file. In many
instances it is desirable to generate more than one output
file.
<LI> WEB enforces Knuth's individual style of
indentation. WEB supplies commands to over-ride the
automatic indentation, but it is an uphill battle and the
code becomes clogged up with format
directives.
<LI> WEB does not cater for non-standard Pascal
programs. In particular, all identifiers are truncated to
about eight characters.
<LI> WEB formats the program output file into a form
that is unreadable to humans.
<LI> WEB does not provide an include facility. This
was considered a feature essential for supporting macro
libraries.
<LI> WEB provides macros with at most one parameter.
Knuth describes a hack that can extract a multiple parameter
macro facility from a single parameter one, but it is
hardly satisfactory.
<LI> WEB does not provide conditionals.
</UL>
<P>Most of these objections boiled down to two points:
that WEB is far too specialized, and that Knuth's
"Occam's Razor" had cut too
far. What I wanted was a documentation system that employed
all the same principles as WEB but was far more general.
The result was FunnelWeb V1 which could process
programs in any language or any combination of languages at
the cost of setting the text in <SAMP>tt font</SAMP> instead
of typesetting it in a language-specific way, as WEB does.
<P>Originally, it was intended that FunnelWeb would be
typesetter independent as well as language independent. It
was intended that a format file consisting of a set of
productions describing how the document file was to be
formatted would be handed to FunnelWeb along with the input
file. However, time pressures forced me to take the back
door and hack up a TeX document file generator. In version
3.2 an HTML generator was added.
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