Data-driven programming

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. Standard examples of data-driven languages are the text-processing languages sed and AWK, 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.