Languages for bibliography styles

BibTEX is the most commonly used bibliography processor in conjunction with LATEX. 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 LATEX 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.