Bibtex in Lisp?

Drew McDermott

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Feb 5, 2002, 2:11:37 PM2/5/02

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Does anyone know of a Bibtex implementation in Lisp?

(If you don't know what bibtex is, ignore this query. If you do, bear
in mind that bibtex has two parts: the part that parses .bib files, and
the part that interprets the "anonymous bibtex forth-like" language
(ABFLL) to produce .bbl files. A lisp implementation could replace
ABFLL with Lisp itself. This would require rewriting .bst files as lisp
files, but only for the formats one cares about, and the lisp versions
would be much, much cooler.)

-- Drew McDermott

Rahul Jain

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Feb 5, 2002, 10:09:47 PM2/5/02

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Drew McDermott <drew.mc...@yale.edu> writes:

> Does anyone know of a Bibtex implementation in Lisp?

That would be a cool thing for LambdaTeX. Now if I could ever find the
time to do it between the flood of homework assignments...

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Matthias Koeppe

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Feb 6, 2002, 5:19:44 AM2/6/02

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Drew McDermott <drew.mc...@yale.edu> writes:

> Does anyone know of a Bibtex implementation in Lisp?

I am currently writing such an implementation because I got tired of
customizing the bibliography with the "anonymous bibtex forth-like"
language.

See http://www.freesoftware.fsf.org/cl-bibtex/

> (If you don't know what bibtex is, ignore this query. If you do, bear
> in mind that bibtex has two parts: the part that parses .bib files, and

I have this part running.

> the part that interprets the "anonymous bibtex forth-like" language
> (ABFLL) to produce .bbl files.

This part as well.

> A lisp implementation could replace
> ABFLL with Lisp itself. This would require rewriting .bst files as lisp
> files, but only for the formats one cares about, and the lisp versions
> would be much, much cooler.)

I'm planning to write a compiler that transforms existing BibTeX style
files into comprehensible Common Lisp programs. This requires some
"type analysis" for the "wizard-defined functions" to know how many
arguments they take and how many values they put on the stack, etc.

New bibliography styles would be written in Lisp, however. The
cl-bibtex system already provides all the interesting primitive
functions of BibTeX (formatting names, etc.), but Lisp versions of
common subroutines (like the FUNCTION {n.dashify} from amsalpha.bst,
for instance) still need to be written.

Any help is welcome.

--
Matthias Köppe -- http://www.math.uni-magdeburg.de/~mkoeppe

Drew McDermott

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Feb 7, 2002, 10:22:45 AM2/7/02

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Matthias Koeppe wrote:

> I am currently writing such an implementation because I got tired of
> customizing the bibliography with the "anonymous bibtex forth-like"
> language.
>
> See http://www.freesoftware.fsf.org/cl-bibtex/

Great! I will check it out.

It occurs to me that a better acronym is BAFLL: Bibtex Anonymous Forth-Like
Language.

-- Drew McDermott