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Web (programming system)

programming language

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionNov 18, 2025
Entity authorityQ1141484 ↗
Source-derived summary

Web, traditionally styled WEB, is a computer programming system created by Donald Knuth as the first implementation of what he called "literate programming": his idea that one could create software as works of literature, by embedding source code in descriptive text, rather than the reverse. Unlike standard programming practice which relegates documentation to comments, the WEB approach is to write an article to document the making of the source code, and to include all the source code in that article, so as to be compilable therefrom.

Philosophy

The common practice in most programming languages is that the primary text is source code, optionally supplemented by descriptive text in the form of comments. Knuth proposed that making the descriptive text primary was putting things in an order more convenient for human readers, rather than the order demanded by compilers.

Much like TeX articles, the Web source text is divided into sections according to documentation flow. For example, in CWEB, code sections are seamlessly intermixed in the line of argumentation.

Implementations

The original WEB system depends on Pascal and comprises two programs:

TANGLE, which produces compilable Pascal code from the source texts, and

WEAVE, which through the use of TeX produces nicely-formatted, printable documentation from the same source texts.

Others:

CWEB (below) is a version of Web for the C programming language, while

noweb is a separate literate programming tool, which is inspired by Web (as reflected in the name) and which is language agnostic.

The most significant programs written in Web are TeX and Metafont. Modern TeX distributions however use another program called Web2C to convert Web source to C.

CWEB

CWEB is a computer programming system created by Donald Knuth and Silvio Levy as a follow-up to Knuth's WEB literate programming system, using the C programming language (and to a lesser extent the C++ and Java programming languages) instead of Pascal.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Web (programming system)” as programming language. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around programming, system and language.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current 311-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with programming, system and language providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Web (programming system)”, the useful work is to connect “programming language” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 18, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1141484. The Library of Congress control number is sh85145873. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Web (programming system)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.