[Orgmode] [Beta Release / Development Invitation] Org-Babel --- code evaluation for reproducible-research and literate-programming in org-mode

[Eric Schulte]

For the past couple of months I have been working on Org-Babel, with Dan
Davison and (initially) Austin Frank.  Through Org-Babel Org-Mode can
communicate with programming languages.  Code contained in source-code
blocks can be evaluated and data can pass seamlessly between different
programming languages, Org-Mode constructs (tables, file links, example
text) and interactive comint buffers. One part of the project is the
"Library of Babel", which will be an extensible collection of ready-made
and easily-shortcut-callable source-code blocks for handling common
tasks.

Org-Babel provides a unified backend for source-code evaluation from
Org-Mode and with the "Library of Babel" does/will...
- allow seamless passing of data between source-code blocks and other
  org-mode constructs (tables, file links, example text)
- allow chaining of source-code blocks in different languages
- allow calling of source-code blocks from tables
- support literate programming (org-babel-tangle)
- enable reproducible research (multilingual Sweave-like functionality,
  i.e. plots and analysis results united with the code to generate them)
- replace org-exp-blocks enabling interactive evaluation of blocks
- replace org-plot
- replace org-R

We have been intending to share this with the list once development
stabilized, however this has proven to be a moving target as ideas for
new development have continually arisen faster than they have been
implemented.  Given the many recent related threads on list we've
decided now is a good time for an initial beta release and
development/feedback solicitation.

Please find the code at [1] or clone it from [2].  In the base directory
of the repo you will find org-babel.org, a monolithic file which
contains more information than you could ever want to know about the
functionality and development of Org-Babel.  If anyone wants to help
please send patches to Dan or myself, or contact me for commit access to
the repo.

Thanks and Enjoy,
Eric Schulte and Dan Davison

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://github.com/eschulte/org-babel/tree/master

[2]  git://github.com/eschulte/org-babel.git