1 f5186101 2020-12-30 op I’m enjoying writing literate programming-esque posts. I have written two of them in the last months, and I’ll definitely write more in the future.
3 f5186101 2020-12-30 op => /post/joy-of-elisp-sndio.gmi The joy of elisp: an example
4 f5186101 2020-12-30 op => /post/parsing-gemtext-with-clojure.gmi Parsing Gemtext with Clojure
6 f5186101 2020-12-30 op I’m new to the idea of literate programming, so I hope you’ll excuse my lack of knowledge on the matter.
8 f5186101 2020-12-30 op Those two posts were written by taking the sources of an already written program and splitting them into pieces, adding commentary text here and there.
10 f5186101 2020-12-30 op I liked, but I have a greater plan that I’ll try to follow. This Great Plan requires various steps, many of which I don’t really know how to do, but I did an initial one that I think I’d like to share: tangling literate text/gemini into a source file.
12 f5186101 2020-12-30 op If I’m not mistaking, in the scope of literate programming the term “tangle” means “putting the chunk of codes together into a source file.”
14 f5186101 2020-12-30 op I wrote a quick program to do this, and it’s called tango. (no, it’s not written in go)
16 f5186101 2020-12-30 op => https://git.omarpolo.com/tango/about Tango git repository
17 f5186101 2020-12-30 op => https://github.com/omar-polo/tango GitHub mirror
19 f5186101 2020-12-30 op It’s a C program that parses text/gemini from standard input (or from given files) and tangle the code blocks into a single stream (standard output or a given file). It’s able to conditionally export block of codes using a given regexp that will match on the alt text of the preformatted block.
21 f5186101 2020-12-30 op Even if I’m posting it after, it predates my AWK script to convert text/gemini to HTML. In retrospect, I could have probably saved some lines of code by writing it in AWK.
23 f5186101 2020-12-30 op => /post/text-gemini-to-html-with-awk.gmi text/gemini to HTML with AWK
25 f5186101 2020-12-30 op At the moment tango is quite simplistic: it outputs the block in the order it finds them. Other, and more sophisticate, literate programming tools allow for more control over this. For instance, in org-mode you can name a block of code and then “include” it into another block using the syntax:
27 f5186101 2020-12-30 op ```how to include a code block from within another one in org-mode
28 f5186101 2020-12-30 op <<block name>>
31 f5186101 2020-12-30 op Honestly, I don’t like this. I mean, I would like to have something like this in tango, but I heavily dislike the syntax for inclusion. Ideally, the information of “put that thing here” should be outside the code block. Or maybe it’s a silly idea.
33 f5186101 2020-12-30 op Anyway, this is all I have this time, hope you enjoy the idea.
