Literature programming – tool support for authoring and reviewing a scientific paper

Authoring or reviewing a scientific paper is tedious to avoid or to locate presentational errors. Errors such as spelling, grammar can be checked by existing tools, whereas structural errors for concepts are harder to detect. Converting a technical paper into a program, the “literature programming” proposed in this paper allows existing program analysis tools to be reused for detecting and resolving some of its writing problems. For example, a simple C/C++ parser can be reused to check type errors that can not be captured by spelling and grammatical checkers; redundancies and false dependencies can be exposed and removed by the restructuring tool we developed for C/C++ programs. In general, an analogy between the literature (in terms of papers) and the software (in terms of programs) is made to reuse software engineering tools for literature programming (writing/reviewing/studying). The work has been applied to a recently published ICSE paper, showing a promising direction of software engineering-aided literature programming.