A Literate Programming Environment for Human and Machine Agents

Abstract

This paper introduces an environment for constructing literate programs in concert with language-aware machine agents. This environment includes a grammar for executable program essays, a parser that treats names as first-class objects, an internal name-graph which relates prose, names and executable artifacts, and a binding mechanism for existing languages and testing toolsets. This supports co-location of code with its most relevant natural language and structured data context, making better use of Large Language Model (LLM) context windows. It also provides LLM coding agents with a toolset more analogous to the symbol-aware search and usage information available in human programmer-facing Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). We describe a working implementation with bindings to three established programming languages, and several example programs.