Paper Info
Title
Featherweight TeX and Parser Correctness
Abstract
TEX (and its LATEX incarnation) is a widely used document preparation system for technical and scientific documents. At the same time, TEX is also an unusual programming language with a quite powerful macro system. Despite the wide range of TEX users (especially in the scientific community), and despite a widely perceived considerable level of "pain" in using TEX, there is almost no research on TEX. This paper is an attempt to change that. To this end, we present Featherweight TEX, a formal model of TEX which we hope can play a similar role for TEX as Featherweight Java did for Java. The main technical problem which we study in terms of Featherweight TEX is the parsing problem. As for other dynamic languages performing syntactic analysis at runtime, the concept of "static" parsing and its correctness is unclear in TEX and shall be clarified in this paper. Moreover, it is the case that parsing TEX is impossible in general, but we present evidence that parsers for practical subsets exists. We furthermore outline three immediate applications of our formalization of TEX and its parsing: a macro debugger, an analysis that detects syntactic inconsistencies, and a test framework for TEX parsers.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1007/978-3-642-19440-5_26
software language engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
tex user,main technical problem,parser correctness,macro debugger,detects syntactic inconsistency,featherweight tex,featherweight java,document preparation system,tex parsers,parsing problem,parsing tex
Programming language,Parse tree,Computer science,Debugger,Correctness,Abstract syntax tree,Natural language processing,Artificial intelligence,Parsing,Macro,Java,Syntax
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
6563
0302-9743
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.87
10
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sebastian Erdweg146133.21
Klaus Ostermann245723.97