Literate Programming

Table of Contents

Games
Tools
Comments

Literate programming is a programming methodology conceived by Donald Knuth while working on Tex. In literate programming, programs are written in natural languages to explain the application’s login with snippets of traditional source code between the explanation. A processing tool is then able to extract the snippets of code and reorder them in a form suitable for the computer to understand.

The tools and games below are exercises that I made to try out literate programming. Most of these applications are simple on purpose, the goal was to learn about literate programming. Although, I believe that most of these applications might be read as simple tutorials.

Warning

The documents below have been declared “boring as hell” by some of my acquaintances. This might be because I am not a native English speaker and I can’t seem to convey my meaning in a easily understandable way. It might be because I am, as a person, as funny as watching the paint dry.

Games

Bulls and Cows (PDF) — A very simple command line code-breaking game based on a paper and pecil game of the same name. Written in C++.
hangman (PDF) — A simple command line hangman game. Written in C++.
pong (PDF) - A clone of the well known classic Pong. Written in C and curses.
horde (PDF) - An ASCII-based clone of an action-strategy game called The Horde. Written in C and curses.
Monster Sweeper (PDF) - An ASCII demake of Hojamaka Games' Mamono Sweeper. Written in C++ and curses.
Balls! (PDF) - Remove bouncing balls from the screen with only a single explosion. Written in C++, SDL, and SDL_ttf.
Android Balls! (PDF) - An Android port of Balls!. Written in Java.
iTouchBalls (PDF) - An iOS port of Balls!. Written in Objective-C.
Ascii Maze (PDF) — My entry for the 21st Ludum Dare competition held on 19th-21st August 2011. The competition’s theme was Escape and I dediced to make a simple top-view maze game in C++ and libtcod.

Tools

atangle (PDF) — Extracts and sorts code snippets from literate programs written using AsciiDoc. Written in Vala.
cpif (PDF) — Overwrites a file with the contents of the standard file if the file’s contents and the input are different. Written in Vala.
DocBook to XHTML (PDF) — Converts DocBook documents to XHTML while using Pygments to syntax highlight programlisting, source, and synopsis tags. This is the tool used to generate all literate applications in this site. Written in Python.

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