The shell script uses utilities that are written in C, probably totaling way more lines of system programming language code than Knuth's Pascal solution.

It's a pretty unfair comparison, since the literate programming solution was not presented in order to show a code-golfed word histogram, but how to annotate code.

The has trie structure was included in it for that purpose, to show how you use literate programming to annotate such a thing.

> First of all, we found that Literate Programming as conceived by Knuth not just “text, code, text, code”.

Unfortunately, it's something worse! It's a system in which you chop up a program into arbitrary sections, and give these macro-like names. The sections are presented in some aribitrary order and hierarchically combined together using those macro-like names.

Like, say:

The program's overall structure is to accept input, performs some processing and produce output:

   accept_input

   do_processing

   produce_output

The divisions don't follow function boundaries. A specific loop inside a specific function might have its own section, and the variable declarations above their own.

It's basically horrible. You can't see the code all in one piece at all when editing it. It won't play with your existing tools. The generated result won't even have proper indentation.

Web and CWeb are programs geared toward someone who is an academic, mainly interested in writing a paper that revolves around a small amount of code.

What you're really writing is a paper, such that both the typeset paper (with nicely typeset code), and accompanying code pops out from the same source. The raison d'etre is that paper though.

You would be suicidal to use this to write an actual application that doesn't need to be detailed in an academic paper.

Knuth did somewhat take it to those extremes, but working alone.

If we look at TeX, the bulk of it consists of a single tex.web file which is simultaneously not such a large volume of work (less than 25,000 lines of code of documentation and data, less than a 1024K megabyte) ... yet too large to be all in a single file.