Starfish: A Prototype for Universal Preprocessing and Text-Embedded Programming
This work addresses the problem of isolated implementations in programming and data science tools, offering a more integrated approach, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing ideas.
The paper tackles the fragmented use of preprocessing and text-embedded programming across systems like TeX, PHP, and Jupyter by proposing a unified framework, and it presents Starfish, an open-source prototype implemented in Perl that embodies novel principles such as universality and transparency.
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.