Literate programming is a programming methodology that combines a programming language with a documentation language, making programs more easily maintained than programs written only in a high-level language. A literate programmer is an essayist who writes programs for humans to understand. When programs are written in the recommended style they can be transformed into documents by a document compiler and into efficient code by an algebraic compiler. This anthology of essays includes Knuth's early papers on related topics such as structured programming as well as the Computer Journal article that launched literate programming. Many examples are given, including excerpts from the programs for TeX and METAFONT. The final essay is an example of CWEB, a system for literate programming in C and related languages. Index included.

Software -- Programming Techniques.

How the theoretical tools of literacy help us understand programming in its historical, social and conceptual contexts. The message from educators, the tech community, and even politicians is clear: everyone should learn to code. To emphasize the universality and importance of computer programming, promoters of coding for everyone often invoke the concept of “literacy,” drawing parallels between reading and writing code and reading and writing text. In this book, Annette Vee examines the coding-as-literacy analogy and argues that it can be an apt rhetorical frame. The theoretical tools of literacy help us understand programming beyond a technical level, and in its historical, social, and conceptual contexts. Viewing programming from the perspective of literacy and literacy from the perspective of programming, she argues, shifts our understandings of both. Computer programming becomes part of an array of communication skills important in everyday life, and literacy, augmented by programming, becomes more capacious. Vee examines the ways that programming is linked with literacy in coding literacy campaigns, considering the ideologies that accompany this coupling, and she looks at how both writing and programming encode and distribute information. She explores historical parallels between writing and programming, using the evolution of mass textual literacy to shed light on the trajectory of code from military and government infrastructure to large-scale businesses to personal use. Writing and coding were institutionalized, domesticated, and then established as a basis for literacy. Just as societies demonstrated a “literate mentality” regardless of the literate status of individuals, Vee argues, a “computational mentality” is now emerging even though coding is still a specialized skill.

This anthology of essays from Donald Knuth, the inventor of literate programming includes early essays on related topics such as structured programming, as well as The Computer Journal article that launched literate programming itself. Many examples are given, including excerpts from the programs for TeX and METAFONT. The final essay is an example of CWEB, a system for literate programming in C and related languages.Knuth feels that computer programs and books about computer programming should be interesting, entertaining, and literate. Thirteen of Knuth's most interesting essays are collected here, including the Computer Journal article that launched literate programming. Although most of the examples are in either Pascal or ALGOL 60, C programmers and others will still benefit from the material. The last essay describes CWEB, a system for literate programming in C and related languages. Highly recommended for all programmers and would-be programmers.

This is a comprehensive account of the semantics and the implementation of the whole Lisp family of languages, namely Lisp, Scheme and related dialects. It describes 11 interpreters and 2 compilers, including very recent techniques of interpretation and compilation. The book is in two parts. The first starts from a simple evaluation function and enriches it with multiple name spaces, continuations and side-effects with commented variants, while at the same time the language used to define these features is reduced to a simple lambda-calculus. Denotational semantics is then naturally introduced. The second part focuses more on implementation techniques and discusses precompilation for fast interpretation: threaded code or bytecode; compilation towards C. Some extensions are also described such as dynamic evaluation, reflection, macros and objects. This will become the new standard reference for people wanting to know more about the Lisp family of languages: how they work, how they are implemented, what their variants are and why such variants exist. The full code is supplied (and also available over the Net). A large bibliography is given as well as a considerable number of exercises. Thus it may also be used by students to accompany second courses on Lisp or Scheme.

This updated edition describes both the mathematical theory behind a modern photorealistic rendering system as well as its practical implementation. Through the ideas and software in this book, designers will learn to design and employ a full-featured rendering system for creating stunning imagery. Includes a companion site complete with source code for the rendering system described in the book, with support for Windows, OS X, and Linux.

Our civilization runs on software. Yet the art of creating it continues to be a dark mystery, even to the experts. To find out why it’s so hard to bend computers to our will, Scott Rosenberg spent three years following a team of maverick software developers—led by Lotus 1-2-3 creator Mitch Kapor—designing a novel personal information manager meant to challenge market leader Microsoft Outlook. Their story takes us through a maze of abrupt dead ends and exhilarating breakthroughs as they wrestle not only with the abstraction of code, but with the unpredictability of human behavior— especially their own.