This article needs additional citations for verification. (March 2011) |
In computer programming, data-driven programming is a programming paradigm in which the program statements describe the data to be matched and the processing required rather than defining a sequence of steps to be taken.[1] Standard examples of data-driven languages are the text-processing languages sed and AWK,[1] and the document transformation language XSLT, where the data is a sequence of lines in an input stream – these are thus also known as line-oriented languages – and pattern matching is primarily done via regular expressions or line numbers.
[AWK is] often called a data-driven language -- the program statements describe the input data to match and process rather than a sequence of program steps