Dynamic Documents with R and knitr, 2nd Edition

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Introduction

The basic idea behind dynamic documents stems from literate programming, a programming paradigm conceived by Donald Knuth (Knuth, 1984). The original idea was mainly for writing software: mix the source code and documentation together; we can either extract the source code out (called tangle) or execute the code to get the compiled results (called weave). A dynamic document is not entirely different from a computer program: for a dynamic document, we need to run software packages to compile our ideas (often implemented as source code) into numeric or graphical output, and insert the output into our literal writings (like documentation).

We explain the idea with a trivial example: suppose we need to write the value of 2π into ...