[Texmacs-dev] literate programming for TeXmacs

[Felix Breuer]

Hello everyone,

almost a year ago I published a working version of a small literate programming
system for use with TeXmacs. It did work with TeXmacs but it was not a proper
plugin and therefore not (yet) included with TeXmacs. It is still available 
here:

    http://www.fbreuer.de/files/LP4TeXmacs-0.1.tar.gz

I started working on a proper plugin for TeXmacs, but then realized that for
that system to be really useful, it would need the capability to automatically
update the code in the .tm file when the code in the generated files is changed.
This capability is what makes Leo [1] a great tool. I will call it roundtrip
literate programming below.

As LP4TeXmacs generated the code files by first exporting the .tm file into the 
.tmml XML format, I started thinking about a tool that provides roundtrip lp 
functionality for arbitrary XML document types. I think it is well possible to
write such a tool, but it is much more complicated than the mechanism used in
LP4Texmacs. 

So instead of investing the considerable time to implement the above, I asked 
myself: would such a tool work well enough with TeXmacs to warrant the effort?
In the end, I do not think so. Because that mechanism would require exporting
the document as .tmml when generating the files, updating the .tmml file when
changes are made and importing that .tmml file again, effectively reloading the
entire document for every update. 

The way I see it now, a roundtrip lp tool for XML documents would be great and
useful and so would a roundtrip lp tool for TeXmacs, but I don't think both
objective can be achieved elegantly with a single piece of software.


I am thinking about integrating roundtrip lp functionality directly into 
TeXmacs,
perhaps analogous to the include primitive (as Joris once suggested). My 
questions
are

* How would such a thing best be implemented?

* How would this fit together with the session support in TeXmacs? I remember,
  that someone mentioned storing "session scripts" in TeXmacs documents along
  with their result, so that the the session could be modified and the result
  recomputed later on. What became of that venture?


Thanks,
Felix