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Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: String-Based Macro Systems Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2024 02:29:56 -0000 (UTC) Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 60 Message-ID: <uvcqn3$2pju0$1@dont-email.me> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2024 04:29:56 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="c07c9bb19a0975fd36cf4a2cbd5e0704"; logging-data="2936768"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/2fvop800Pf1Djeqvf9uy3" User-Agent: Pan/0.155 (Kherson; fc5a80b8) Cancel-Lock: sha1:sVkClwXkjr7eI1Y7CzC+FKk2tFg= Bytes: 3470 I think most of us are familiar with the “#define” preprocessor in C and C++. There are more powerful macro processors around, like GNU m4. They all have the same basic concept: pass input text straight through to output, until something triggers a macro substitution on the text. The original m4 was created by the Unix folks at Bell Labs, modelled on an earlier concept called “Macrogenerator” by Christopher Strachey (one of the brains behind the programming language CPL, which led to BCPL, which led to B and then C). Macrogenerator had special symbols to indicate macro definition, and macro and argument expansion: §DEF,«name»,<«definition»>; where the “<” and “>” are actual quote symbols in the notation, while I use “«” and ”»” as metasyntactic brackets. Within the «definition», occurrences of “~1”, “~2” etc are replaced with the first, second etc actual argument specified in the call. You then use this macro as §«name»,«args»; where multiple arguments are comma-separated. Simple example: given §DEF,greetings,<Hello, ~1!>; then I would just like to say, “§greetings,world;” to anybody listening should expand to I would just like to say, “Hello, world!” to anybody listening Here is a moderately interesting example, from the Bryan Higman book where I first heard about this. It uses a builtin called §UPDATE, which does assignment to an existing macro name, and also note the occurrence of §DEFs within §DEFs, for local (temporary) macro definitions (since the auxiliary macro §Q has to persist between invocations, it cannot be one of these): §DEF,Q,A; §DEF,AORB,<§§Q;;>,§DEF,A,<A§UPDATE,Q,B;>;,§DEF,B,<B§UPDATE,Q,A;>;; What this does is, each time you write “§AORB;”, it expands to alternately “A” or “B”. The big difference with m4 is that it does away with these special symbols; the mere occurrence of a name matching a defined macro (or an argument of the macro currently being expanded) is sufficient to trigger substitution. Do you think this is a good idea? There are all kinds of pitfalls with such macro systems. The original Macrogenerator could not cope with substitutions containing unpaired “< ... >” quote symbols, and even GNU m4 lacks something as simple as a backslash-style “escape next single character, whatever it is”. While m4 lets you switch the quoting symbols, it still insists that they occur in pairs. Would adding such an escape character be useful?