A Proposal for Universal Preprocessing and Text-Embedded Programming (PTEP) System

Abstract

We present a novel concept of universal text pre-processing 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. We define the following novel principles of the Universal PTEP: generality, update and replace modes, flexibility, configurability, transparency, and embedded programming language use. We present an open-source system Starfish for PTEP, which satisfies those principles. We describe the operating model and design of Starfish, which is an open-source system implementing these PTEP principles in Perl. The system is transparent and its design allows direct implementation in other programming languages as well.