Comment by DonHopkins

Not exactly, but true insofar as SVG and PDF files are basically PostScript programs with the code and logic stripped out, and effective drawing commands left in (or "distilled out"), which is that they merely represent the graphical output, without the Turing complete programming language underneath. With all the loops unrolled and mathematical expressions, logic, and conditions evaluated.

Capturing the graphical output of a program (just drawing commands, or calls to any api surface like turtle graphics, or stencil/paint porter/duff renderinging API, i.e. PostScript => PDF, SVG, or HTML canvas 2d rendering context) is called "partial evaluation".

>What you've described sounds exactly like a PostScript interpreter! You can easily write a metacircular PostScript interpreter in PostScript!

http://www.donhopkins.com/home/psiber/cyber/distill.ps.txt

>Glenn Reid, who also wrote books on PostScript like Thinking in PostScript, pioneered that idea in his "PostScript Language Distillery", which is the idea that grew into PDF.

http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/postscript/newerstill.ps....

Glenn tells me that the PostScript distillery was actually John Warnock's idea!