Lessons from a Bibliography Program's Reimplementation

AbstractThis article reports our experience in the reimplementing of the bibliography program BibTEX, associated with the LATEX word processor. First, we present the new features of our new version—called MlBibTEX—in comparison with “old” BibTEX and justify them. By the way, we show that tools for reeingineering data—that is, bibliography files—are necessary. Then, from a point of view more related to language description, we explain why we had to formalise the precise grammar of the formalism used by BibTEX, how we took advantage of this approach, and how we reimplemented the final program