WEB languages allow you to write a single source file that can produce both a compilable program and a well-formatted document describing the program in as much detail as you wish to prepare. Writing in this kind of dual-purpose language is called literate programming. (The Usenet newsgroup `comp.programming.literate' and the mailing list <litprog@shsu.edu> are devoted to this subject; they are gatewayed to each other.)
WEB-like languages have been implemented with many pairs of base languages: Cweb provides C and Troff (see section References); CWEB provides C and TeX (`CTAN:/web/c_cpp/cweb'); Spiderweb provides C, C++, Awk, Ada, many others, and TeX (`CTAN:/web/spiderweb'); and, of course, the original WEB provides Pascal and TeX, the implementation languages for the original TeX, Metafont, MetaPost, and related programs to come from the TeX project at Stanford.
The original WEB language is documented in the file `webman.tex', which is included in the `ftp://ftp.tug.org/tex/lib.tar.gz' archive (and available in many other places, of course).
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