Date: Tue, 13 Feb 1996 15:45:42 -0600 (CST)
From: Aaron Ucko <UCKO AT VAX1 DOT ROCKHURST DOT EDU>
Subject: Re: More Complex preprocessors
To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Message-id: <01I164O0S8PG000H5K@VAX1.ROCKHURST.EDU>
Organization: Rockhurst College; Kansas City, MO
MIME-version: 1.0

>Hi All,
>
>Every so often I keep wishing that C/C++ had a decent macro preprocessor
>of the order of most macro-assemblers. I've had a play around with the
>different tools available and cannot find anything that really suits me.
>
>Can anyone suggest anything?
>
>Here is what I have looked at so far.
>
>1) m4   This does give me much of what I want, however the m4 commands
>        use words which could easily be used in the c code (shift, eval,
>        index, len, etc...) causing all kinds of possible bugs.
>
>        I would prefer each preprocessor line to be obvious ie starting
>        with # or some other flag.

The fvwm sources contain an m4 file to rename all m4 identifiers to start
with (I seem to recall) an underscore; a modified version of this macro
(to use something like _m4_ as the prefix) might work.

What would be _really_ nice, though, would be something like TeX's "mouth."
Everything special begins with an escape character (\ in TeX, perhaps # in
tcpp), and almost completely arbitrary syntax is legal.


-- Aaron Ucko (ucko AT vax1 DOT rockhurst DOT edu; finger for PGP public key) | httyp!
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