Quick and Dirty Literate Programming

Peter Hoffmann

October 14, 2010 · python

Docco and its Python port Pycco generate literate-programming-style documentation with the comments next to the code. Example: gnome sort in Python.

This post is from 2010. Some of the content may be outdated.

I just stumbled upon docco, the quick-and-dirty, hundred-line-long, literate-programming-style documentation generator. I really like the concept of having the documentation on the left side and the implementation code on the right side.

The following example is an implementation of the gnome sort algorithm in python:

There are ports to other languages as well:

• rocco written in ruby
• shocco written in shell script
• pycco written in python, currently supports python, coffee-script, javascript, ruby, scheme and lua. Pycco uses pygments to format the code, so it is very easy to add support for other languages.