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Difficulties with WEB
WEB has its enthusiasts but is not without its detractors! There are minor
concerns about its verbosity, but the major criticism is the difficulty of
working with the source code. This arises in several ways:
-
There is a great deal of textual material surrounding the code.
-
Following the thread of control may be made more difficult by the modular
construction.
-
Debuggers, compilers etc. can generate erroneous or misleading line
numbers. With C, which has a line number pragma, this is not too much of a
problem.
The first two of these require a good editor --- emacs is highly
suitable - to enable smooth movement around the document. The matter of
order seems to then become less important with practice. Knuth claims that
it is easier to work with and the authors' experience is rather
similar.
The third is a system problem with which we have to live at present. Only
very rarely is it necessary to go to the intermediate source code to
unravel some problem.
In fact, this difficulty would only be really serious if the source file
were very
large, bringing us to the issue discussed in the next section.