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.

Software Engineering (cs.SE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Programming Languages (cs.PL)

arXiv:2608.24644 [cs.SE]

(or arXiv:2608.24644v1 [cs.SE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.24644 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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