https://github.com/vjcitn/but-is-it-literate
historical reflection on literate statistical computing
https://github.com/vjcitn/but-is-it-literate
Last synced: 4 months ago
JSON representation
historical reflection on literate statistical computing
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/vjcitn/but-is-it-literate
- Owner: vjcitn
- Created: 2018-09-26T13:54:19.000Z (over 6 years ago)
- Default Branch: master
- Last Pushed: 2018-09-26T20:07:29.000Z (over 6 years ago)
- Last Synced: 2025-01-09T13:46:37.990Z (5 months ago)
- Size: 1.26 MB
- Stars: 0
- Watchers: 3
- Forks: 0
- Open Issues: 0
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
Awesome Lists containing this project
README
# but-is-it-literate
inspired by Y. Xie's [note on notebooks](https://yihui.name/en/2018/09/notebook-war/)
## historical reflection on the literature of literate statistical computing
A [2001 paper in CHANCE](https://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09332480.2001.10542284#.W6uA-hNKh0s) described the use of
[noweb](https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/noweb/) for literate
statistical software development.
It was just literate programming applied to programming
for a simple simulation task.
This predated Sweave but not by much. See [Leisch 2002](https://cran.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/Rnews_2002-3.pdf), and its reference to work by
Tony Rossini.
## purpose of this repo
The CHANCE paper is not readily available. The noweb
associated with the paper goes beyond defining a function.
It demonstrates how a complete checkable package can be defined
in a single noweb file.
With a proper installation of noweb, the following commands
(issued in a clone of this repo)
generate a very lightly modified HTML version of the paper:
```
notangle -t8 -R"AdminMakefile" Rpack.nw > AdminMakefile
make -f AdminMakefile Rpack.html
```
I have not figured out how to escape the angle brackets
needed for image inclusion. A simple tweak to the generated
HTML includes the revised.png figure.
The following commands create and check the package.
```
notangle -t8 -R"AdminMakefile" Rpack.nw > AdminMakefile
make -f AdminMakefile package
```
## real use of noweb in statistical software development
Extensive use of noweb in advanced R software development
is found at Luke Tierney's [software projects site](http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~luke/R/).
See for example the page on [regular expressions](http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~luke/R/regexp.html).
## literate data analysis antecedents in S
John Chambers responded to a query I made in 2009 concerning
facilities I remembered seeing in S back in the 1990s.
Briefly, with S REPORT authors could combine nroff, pic, tbl and
S code to produce ... reports. With figures, tables, and
textual citations of numbers that are programmatically generated.
Documentation from a 1984 volume on S was supplied by John.
