Requirements for an Elucidative Programming Environment

The main goal with this paper is to motivate and coin a variation of literate programming which we call elucidative programming. Elucidative programming is oriented towards program explanation with the purpose of throwing lights on important and complex program relationships. Since proposed by Knuth in 1984, literate programming has been one of the most viable approaches to a radical improvement of internal program documentation. Unfortunately, most programmers find the ideas of literate programming, as supported by WEB-like tools, for impractical, academic, and far-fetched in relation to current programming practices. With elucidative programming we intend to focus on the best ideas of literate programming. We disregards the aspects of publishing programs as technical literature, and we provide for mechanisms with which documentation can be added to a program without affecting or disturbing the source program. Our ideas about elucidative programming are presented as a number of requirements, and in a discussion of programming environment issues in relation to the new ideas.