The Communications of the TEX Users Group Volume 29 ... - TUG

Languages for bibliography styles
Jean-Michel Hufflen
LIFC (EA CNRS 4269)
University of Franche-Comté
16, route de Gray
25030 Besançon Cedex, France
hufflen (at) lifc dot univ-fcomte dot fr
http://lifc.univ-fcomte.fr/~hufflen
1 Introduction
Abstract
BibTEX is the most commonly used bibliography processor in conjunction with
L ATEX. To put bibliography styles into action, it uses a stack-based language
written with postfixed notation. Recently, other approaches have been proposed:
some use a script programming language for designing bibliography styles, e.g.,
Perl in Bibulus; some are based on converters to XML texts and use XSLT for
bibliography styles; a recent proposal—the biblatex package—consists of using
L ATEX commands to control the layout of generated references, and more. We
propose a comparative study of these approaches and show which programming
styles are encouraged, from a point of view related to methodology. Finally, we
explain how this study has influenced the design of MlBibTEX, our multilingual
reimplementation of BibTEX.
Keywords Bibliographies, bibliography styles, BibTEX, software quality, bst,
BibTEX++, cl-bibtex, MlBibTEX, packages natbib, jurabib, and latexbib, Tib, XML,
XSLT, nbst, Perl, DSSSL.
Three decades ago, 1 some programming languages
were designed to be universal, that is, to serve all
purposes. All of these languages—e.g., PL/1 [25],
Ada [2]—have failed to be accepted as filling this
role. Nowadays, only the C programming language
[30] is still used for a very wide range of applications.
Present-day programming languages are very diverse
and put different paradigms into action: procedural
programming, object-oriented programming, functional
programming, process-oriented programming,
logic programming, ... In addition, most of these
present languages are specialised, that is, designed
for particular purposes, even if they are not formally
limited to only one class of applications: two good examples
are Java [28] and C# [39], originally designed
for client-server applications. But, if you are building
a standalone application using the object-oriented
paradigm and are especially interested in the efficiency
of the resulting program, it is well-known that
a better choice is C++ [47], even if code generated
by Java and C# compilers have greatly improved
since their first versions.
The purpose of this article is neither a comparison
of all programming languages — which would be
1 That is, at the time of TEX’s first version. . . Let us recall
that we are celebrating TEX’s 30th birthday.
impossible—nor an absolute comparison of several
programming languages — which would not be of interest
—but a comparative study of languages used
to develop bibliography styles. BibTEX [42] is the
bibliography processor most commonly used in conjunction
with the L ATEX typesetting engine [40], so
most of the bibliography styles used for L ATEX texts
are written using bst, the stack-based language of
BibTEX [40, § 13.6]. But other proposals exist, based
on other programming paradigms, and this article
aims to study the advantages and drawbacks of these
approaches. We will not discuss the typographical
conventions ruling the typesetting of bibliographies —
readers interested in this topic can consult manuals
like [5, § 10], [6, §§ 15.54–15.76], [16, pp. 53–54]—
but are interested only in the development of bibliography
styles — from scratch or derived from other
existing styles—and the expressive power of languages
used to do that.
In Section 2, we recall the main quality factors of
software, and show which factors are interesting from
a point of view related to bibliography styles. Then
BibTEX is studied in Section 3, including some modern
use of this program. Other approaches are based
on XML, 2 as shown in Section 4. This experience
2 EXtensible Markup Language. Readers interested in an
introductory book to this formalism can refer to [44].
TUGboat, Volume 29 (2008), No. 3 —Proceedings of the 2008 Annual Meeting 401