Code can be literature in specific cases, such as the Shakespeare programming language. It's just a whimsical, esoteric language, like lolcode, but it reads like the Immortal Bard himself was an early adopter of learning to program.
Example of a conditional statement:
Juliet:
Am I better than you?
Hamlet:
If so, let us proceed to scene III.
Shakespeare is only superficially readable. In reality, the logic executed by the program is very nearly unrelated to the way the program reads to a human. Essentially it's a cute syntax over the same old FORTRAN, much like lolcode. It was a missed opportunity to represent logic as meaningful literature.
Example of a conditional statement:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_(programming_langua...