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

TL;DR

Starfish introduces a unified, open-source system for universal text preprocessing and embedded programming, enhancing flexibility and transparency across programming languages.

Contribution

It presents a novel, unified framework for text preprocessing and embedded programming, exemplified by the Perl-based Starfish system.

Findings

Starfish demonstrates universal preprocessing capabilities.

The system supports update and replace modes.

Starfish is designed for transparency and configurability.

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.