On Fri, Nov 24, 2017 at 11:38 PM, Martin Alsinet <martin@alsinet.com.ar> wrote:
Hello Charlie:

I have found that I like better to use a combination of tangle and import instead of noweb syntax.

#+BEGIN_SRC python :tangle board.py
def init_board(args)
    return [[-1 for x in range(3)] for y in range(3)]
#+END_SRC

#+BEGIN_SRC python
import sys
import os
from board import init_board    

def main(args):
    init_board(args)
    
if __name__ == "__main__":
    main(sys.argv)
#+END_SRC

Then, you do a M-x org-babel-tangle and org will write the first block into board.py. Then you go into the second block and run it with C-c C-c and it will load the init_board function from the tangled file.

Writing it this way forces you to modularize your code blocks to be able to call them from other blocks and you can even build your whole application tangling the source blocks into files.

The :noweb syntax seems to me to be a templating solution used for a code module problem.

It can be if you like that style. You can define re-usable and callable source blocks and tangle them to their own file and to other files, too. For example using the example above you can use both approaches:

#+NAME: init
#+BEGIN_SRC python :tangle board.py :comments no
def init_board(args)
    return [[-1 for x in range(3)] for y in range(3)]
#+END_SRC

#+NAME: org_gcr_2017-11-30_mara_1BB0EB7B-1693-458D-B1AD-CE44ED9961C1
#+BEGIN_SRC python :comments no :tangle program.py
import sys
import os

«init»

def main(args):
    init_board(args)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main(sys.argv)
#+END_SRC

Calling `org-babel-expand-src-block'