A BibTeX system in Common Lisp

I am writing a replacement for the BibTeX program in Common Lisp. The aim is to enable the user to format bibliographic entries using Common Lisp programs, rather than using the stack language of BibTeX style files.

Reasons

A powerful tool is needed for dealing with citations in scientific documents. BibTeX is good for formatting bibliographies, but customizing the format is a pain because it requires writing/changing a program in BAFLL (BibTeX Anonymous Forth-Like Language -- Drew McDermott in comp.lang.lisp):

FUNCTION {tie.or.space.connect}
{ duplicate$ text.length$ #3 <
    { "~" }
    { " " }
  if$
  swap$ * *
}

Other citation-related processing like producing a list of authors and citation indices is usually done with a combination of BibTeX, TeX macros, and ad-hoc scripting with perl or awk.

The new cl-bibtex system aims to replace all this.

Status

Alpha. As of version 0.3.1 (released 2002-12-15), the system already has:

A reader for BibTeX style files (.bst),
a reader for bibliography databases (.bib),
a reader for .aux files,
an implementation of BibTeX's built-in functions (like for parsing and formatting names, etc.)
an interpreter for the stack language of BibTeX style files,
a compiler that transforms BibTeX style files into comprehensible Common Lisp programs (using type analysis); see amsalpha.bst and the resulting Common Lisp program amsalpha.lbst
a command-line interface that emulates the BibTeX program

Missing so far:

more precise handling of special characters ({\'o}),
a library of useful subroutines commonly defined in BibTeX style files,
a test-suite, consisting of database files and BibTeX style files, for testing the correctness of cl-bibtex.

Matthias Koeppe

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