English

Starfish: A Prototype for Universal Preprocessing and Text-Embedded Programming

Programming Languages 2020-07-07 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

We present a novel concept of universal text preprocessing and text-embedded programming (PTEP). Preprocessing and text-embedded programming has been widely used in programming languages and frameworks in a fragmented and mutually isolated way. The PTEP ideas can be found in the implementation of the \TeX\ typesetting system; they are prominent in PHP and similar web languages, and finally they are used in the Jupyter data science framework. This paper presents this area of research and related work in a more unified framework, and we describe the implemented system Starfish that satisfies the following novel principles of PTEP: universality, update and replace modes, flexiblity, configurability, and transparency. We describe the operating model and design of Starfish, which is an open-source system implementing universal preprocessing and text-embedded programming in Perl. The system is transparent and its design allows direct implementation in other programming languages as well.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2007.02366,
  title  = {Starfish: A Prototype for Universal Preprocessing and Text-Embedded Programming},
  author = {Vlado Keselj},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.02366},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

16 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:51:55.116Z