I used to agree with this post's general premise, but I have come to think it is wrong. The idea seems to be that a literate program would be ordered such that

I used to agree with this post's general premise, but I have come to think it is wrong. The idea seems to be that a literate program would be ordered such that a reader would not need any familiarity with general boilerplate of the language that is being presented. But there is no real benefit for that. Indeed, it makes everything so much harder if you are trying to have meaningfully original narrative for every single line. Instead, people should know roughly what the outline of a C program is if they are going to try and read a C program. Regardless of if it is done literately or not. To that end, having some generic imports at the top of a file that has a scattering of globals the author typically uses makes a ton of sense. The idea, restated, is to allow you to narrate code. So, think of how you would approach reading anyone's source code that wasn't reformatted in this way. You'd take a look at the general outline of the file. Probably take a quick peak at the basic imports. If there are a common set of top level variables you expect to see, check for those real quick. Then, start trying to find the narrative of the code.