Re: M5

[Gary V. Vaughan]

On Fri, 2002-05-24 at 08:45, Akim Demaille wrote:
> From: Ted STern <address@hidden>
> Subject: Has anybody continued work on M5 (by the late A. Dain Samples)?
> Date: 22 May 2002 21:46:28 +0000

> In looking around the web, I found a reference
> to M5, first announced in 1992 on comp.compilers by A. Dain Samples.  M5
> purported to be a new, general purpose macro language that contained many
> improvements over m4.  Unfortunately Dr. Samples met an untimely death some
> years back (see http://csl.cse.ucsc.edu/~brucem/samples.html ).

This is good stuff -- although I couldn't get the link to the paper to
work, I managed to download the sources and build the dvi from there.

I think that this is interesting enough to slate for future inclusion as
a GNU m4 module post 1.5... potentially beefing up the internals a bit
to support it.  Many of the M5 builtins detailed and other things like
the @; macro could probably be implemented with CVS m4 right now.  I'm
especially keen on the idea of named parameters too, though that would
need some support from the core.

Thanks for the pointer Akim.

Cheers,
        Gary.
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