cpp replaced by m4?

[Mark E. Mallett]

On Tue, Jul 03, 2007 at 04:07:38PM -0400, Ric Werme wrote:
> Thomas Charron may have opened the floodgates:
> 
> >  Can we have an example of why you want to do this?
> 
> I had refrained from suggesting (somewhat tongue in cheek) that you
> should sit down with the MACRO-10 manual (the assembler for the PDP-10)
> and implement its macro processor.  However, since I have an opening....

I refrained too, since I was sure somebody else would bring it up :)

[We] old macro-10 programmers carried macros around like unixers carry
around their collection of shell tools.  Or insert better analogy here.

Macro-10 should have been called a dissembler, since you could hide
(er, abstract) so many things inside of macros.

That 'cog' hack looks interesting, although I am leery of such things
that modify their own source files.  A similar hack is 'ptml' which also
executes embedded python in templates and produces text output.  (Found
this while looking for an old term-rewriting language also called ptml,
for parse tree manipulation language or some such thing.)

mm  (this message adds no value)