Literate Program Execution for Teaching Computational Science

Class material for computer science courses often contains algorithms and code snippets, as well as the results of their execution. Usually, these are written and tested outside the source document then included via copy-and-paste. Making sure that the code compiles and that the results really correspond to the included code is the teacher's responsibility.Using techniques and ideas from literate programming, we propose to include source code and executable instruc-tions inside the source document. To support this, we have implemented Lepton which is a tool for extracting source code, compiling, executing, and including the results of the documented programs. Consequently, copy-and-paste is eliminated and code output is guaranteed to be up-to-date with source code. This manuscript was written with Lepton