PROG — A New Program Documentation System

Though programming languages and programming styles evolve with remarkable speed today, there is no such evolution in the field of program documentation. And although there exist some popular approaches like Knuth’s literate programming system WEB [26], and nowadays JavaDoc [15] or Doxygen [16], tools for managing software development and documentation are not as widespread as desirable.This paper analyses a wide range of literate programming tools available during the past two decades and introduces PROG$\mathcal{DOC}$, a new software documentation system. It is simple, language independent, and it keeps documentation and the documented software consistent. It uses ${\rm L\kern-.36em\raise.3ex\hbox{\sc a}\kern-.15em T\kern-.1667em\lower.7ex\hbox{E}\kern-.125emX}$ for typesetting purposes, supports syntax highlighting for various languages, and produces output in Postscript, PDF or HTML format.