Abstract:

Literate programming tools and practices tend to assume that they should only produce the final, working program, with no intermediate artifacts. This is at odds with incremental program development, which tends to produce many partial programs, often in the form of working tests. We report on the development of a structure editor as a single org-mode document of some two hundred pages, identify three situations in which the assumption of a single final program obstructs development, and describe three mechanisms that remove the obstruction: a header argument restricting a block to the chunks defined before it, a scoped redefinition of a chunk, and a command that tangles the document as it stands at the cursor of the Emacs editor.