This repository is demonstrating an idea about how to implement literate programming using a combination of the following tools:
Among those tools R, pandoc and make are common place in literate programming and used as tools for reproducible analysis 1234.
But it's not been common to see m4 used among them. And it's possible to use
m4's macros to have values computed in R inserted in documents before pandoc
compilation. Here I'm refering to R, but actually it could be any programming
language. Also make is not a requirement, but due to the extra number of
operations involved, it would be more practical to coordinate the steps through
make.
To follow the Makefile here is the best way to figure out how m4 can be
integrated in this approach.
Here m4 is basically avoiding the use of knitr1, but the intent is not to
provide an alternative for this package. But the fact that m4 can be used in
this kind of workflow seems interesting, and might add more flexibility to
some workflows.