Sean and Jay, (01)
I always thought that was the mainstream view: (02)
> I have long taken the view that the primary concern of a
> programming language is to communicate between people -
> a way of formally describing what we expect the computer
> to do and the rationale for that description. (03)
That was certainly one of the main concerns of many of
the pioneers in computer science, such as Dijkstra, Knuth,
McCarthy, Perlis, etc. Following is Knuth's website for
"Literate Programming": (04)
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/lp.html
Knuth: Literate Programming (05)
Following is the opening paragraph of that site. (06)
John Sowa
___________________________________________________________ (07)
Literate programming is a methodology that combines a programming
language with a documentation language, thereby making programs more
robust, more portable, more easily maintained, and arguably more fun to
write than programs that are written only in a high-level language. The
main idea is to treat a program as a piece of literature, addressed to
human beings rather than to a computer. The program is also viewed as a
hypertext document, rather like the World Wide Web. (Indeed, I used the
word WEB for this purpose long before CERN grabbed it!) This book is an
anthology of essays including my early papers on related topics such as
structured programming, as well as the article in The Computer Journal
that launched Literate Programming itself. The articles have been
revised, extended, and brought up to date. (08)
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