What is Zangelding?
It's been windy here today.
Ankh, I
thought that transclusions were supposed to be
bidirectional. Or am I mixing them with Ted's link
concept? In any case, you can't do the full transclusion
thing in XML, as the entity reference does not understand
document versioning.
Anyway, if you like Ted Nelson's work, check out GZigZag,
which is an implementation of his ZigZag structure. It
really blows your mind out.
Ankh, I've read the literate programming column (it is
reprinted in Knuth's Literate
Programming book), and I believe that the part of
MacIlroy's criticism that was based on the Unix pipeline was
unfounded. He did not consider the context where the
program was written: it was an exercise demonstrating a
programming methodology, and it is common for such exercises
to assume that certain solution types are forbidden
(especially those that make the exercise trivial). And in
any case, the original WEB system was Pascal only, so it was
limited in what you could do with it (no Unix pipelines, for
example); but this concern is no longer relevant, as there
are language independent LP tools (like Noweb, which I
mentioned yesterday), and you could actually write the
pipeline in literate style - but since it's so short there
is no point in doing that.