Starting with the most prominent examples (TeX and METAFONT), may be too forbidding. And like them, many of the earliest published examples require that
Before you try to read a WEB program, you should be familiar with the Pascal language.
Knuth has moved on from Pascal to C, and has published many examples of literate
programming on his website. But they
are in the CWEB format (.w files), and people with only a passing curiosity (or
none) in literate programming may not take the trouble to download and run them
through cweave and tex, to read them the way they were intended to be read.
Looking at examples first will be good before you read the paper.
Knuth's examples:
- In WEB:
- glue.web (Fixed-Point Glue Setting) http://northstar-www.dartmouth.edu/doc/texmf-dist/doc/generic/knuth/tex/glue.pdf https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb03-1/tb05knuth.pdf
- Literate programming paper (Generating Primes): Distributed in texmf/doc/web/ also online at e.g. here
- Bentley Programming Pearls columns
- May 1986: generate M random integers in 1 to N
- April 1987: Print k most common words in a file
- TeX
- METAFONT
- In CWEB:
- Included with CWEB distribution (https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/web/c_cpp/cweb/examples)
- Stanford GraphBase (32 programs)
- MMIXWARE (10 programs)
- The list of programs on his website.
Other people's examples:
- van Wyk's columns
- July 1987 Printing common words (by David Hanson)
- Thimbleby's Java code at http://www.harold.thimbleby.net/cv/files/cpp.pdf (pages 13 to 15) which does not use any literate-programming features.
- Norman Ramsey, "A simple solver for linear equations containing nonlinear operators" http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2241&context=cstech
- Les Carr's "Animated Code Annotator": http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/lac/annann.html -- shows the evolution of a file through its diffs / commit history for a file.
- see e.g. http://www.math.umd.edu/~hking/MorseExtract.w
Also:
- https://github.com/izabera/ulam/ which has un-literate-d Knuth's ULAM :-)