And even before this work, there was "PAL: Program-aided Language Models" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.10435, https://reasonwithpal.com/).

Afaik PaLM (Google's OG big models) tried this trick, but it didn't work for them. I think it's because PaL used descriptive inline comments + meaningful variable names. Compare the following:

```python

# calculate the remaining apples

apples_left = apples_bought - apples_eaten

```

vs.

```python

x = y - z

```

We have ablations in https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.10435 showing that both are indeed useful (see "Crafting prompts for PAL").