I'm converting Marpa Cweb is the C version of the "literate programming" system pioneered by Don Knuth. I'm pleasantly surprised by it. Cweb adds fun to the programming experience and is helping in more ways than the phrase "literate programming" would suggest.

One very important feature of Cweb is something that would seem to be a nuisance, or at best an implementation detail. The .w file which contains the Cweb is now the "source". The .c and .h files are now "built files". I am no longer working with the C lang…

I've made bold claims for the portability of [ Marpa is a general BNF parser generator -- it parses from any grammar that you can write in BNF. If the grammar is of one of the kinds currently in practical use (yacc, LR(k), LALR, LL, recursive descent, etc.), this parsing is in linear time. ]

The boldness of my claims evinced no ambition to test them under fire. But, when my main development box (a 2-year Dell laptop running Ubuntu) suddenly died, my only other choice for a development platform was a MacBook G4 running Mac …