on-line-form

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0.1.1.1. Programs/documents in an on-line form

The people-oriented documents produced by literate-programming systems are usually on paper (this system provides those, too). For working programmers, their good properties are largely overshadowed by one fact: paper documents go stale quickly. Also, large programs turn into not-so-navigable large piles of dead trees. Surely we can do better!

Note our emphasis on presenting work-in-progress, as opposed to a system that emphasises the presentation of the final perfect programming gem.

Our goal is that these on-line documents should be the medium of choice for programmers' daily reference. (APRIL91: See the note about "literate Para mode" in section See literate-para-mode.)

Our choice for an on-line format is the GNU Info format, a primitive ASCII-only sort-of hypertext system. The main reason for this choice is to let the GNU people do as much of our programming for us as possible! The program `info' can display Info files on just about any kind of terminal; `xinfo' works with the X Window System; the ubiquitous GNU Emacs has an ever-improving Info mode.