Lmt

Lmt is a literate markdown tangle and weave program for literate programing in a slightly extended Markdown syntax that is written in Ruby.

In literate programming, a program is contained within a prose essay describing the thinking which goes into the program. The source code is then extracted from the essay using a program called tangle (this application). The essay can also be formatted into a document for human consumption using a program called "weave".

For a more detailed description and example, see the tangle program in src/lmt.lmd and the weave program in src/lmw.lmd.

The weaved output may be found in doc/lmt.md and doc/lmw.md

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'lmt'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install lmt

Usage

The tangle program takes input files and produces tangled output files. It is used as follows:

lmt --file {input file} --output {tangled destination} --include-path {comma separated list of include paths}

The weave program is similar but produces weaved output files. It does not recurse down include statements, and so will need to be run independently for each included file. An example usage:

lmw --file {input file} --output [weaved destination] --include-path {comma separated list of include paths}

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Remember, this is a bundler app, and to rum it without installing, you must use the bundle exec command. As an example, the self-tangling command for development is:

bundle exec ruby bin/lmt --file src/lmt/lmt.rb.lmd --output lib/lmt/lmt.rb

To test the weave you can use the following command which will weave the weaver and write it to the doc directory.

bundle exec ruby bin/lmt --file src/lmt/lmw.rb.lmd --output lib/lmt/lmw.rb; bundle exec ruby bin/lmw --file src/lmt/lmw.rb.lmd --output doc/lmt/lmw.rb.md

Since this is a self-bootstraping program, it is both tested and built by running itself on itself. This means that if you add a bug, it won't run. To fix this, check out the most recent version of the output file out of git. To avoid lost work, it is recommended you commit especially often.

git co -- src/lmt/lmt.rb

Prior Art

Some related and similar tools that the reader might find interesting:

• <https://github.com/driusan/lmt>
• <https://github.com/rebcabin/tangledown>
• <https://github.com/vlead/literate-tools>
• <https://github.com/zyedidia/Literate>
• <https://github.com/mqsoh/knot>
• <https://fsprojects.github.io/FSharp.Formatting/sidemarkdown.html>
• <https://github.com/richorama/literate>

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at <https://github.com/MartyGentillon/lmt-ruby>.