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Life & fun · July 8, 2018

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Anansi – a NoWeb-inspired literate programming preprocessor

Anansi – a NoWeb-inspired literate programming preprocessor launched on July 8, 2018 with 57 votes, #754 of 2,673 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 8 years on.

In plain words

Anansi is a preprocessor for literate programming that generates both code and documentation from a single source file, following the NoWeb model. It is designed for programmers who want to integrate documentation and code development. Key features include the ability to include separate files and automatically generate entire directory structures without manual enumeration of outputs.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Anansi is a preprocessor for literate programs, in the model of NoWeb or nuweb . Literate programming allows both computer code and documentation to be generated from a single unified source. Compared to NoWeb, Anansi’s primary benefits are the ability to include separate files, and to automatically generate an entire directory tree from a project without having to enumerate each output. Code : https://john-millikin.com/code/anansi ( GitHub mirror ) Literate programming is a programming paradigm introduced by Donald Knuth in which a program is given as an explanation of the program logic in a natural language, such as English, interspersed with snippets of macros and traditional source…from john-millikin.com

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