Re: M5

[Ted Stern]

On 28 May 2002, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
> 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.

Thank you also, Akim!  I was hoping that somebody in the m4 group would see my
plea for help -- I tried mailing to the m4-forum but my email bounced.

The document server for the paper is flakey.  Make several attempts to get in
before you give up.  Once you get in, the postscript you get is very old Level
1 and doesn't print on some printers.  It helps if you ps2pdf it and print
using acroread.

If you still can't access the server, I've done the ps2pdf processing myself
and can send the pdf file to you individually if you wish.  But it is about
400KB, and I don't want to attach that large a file when CC'ing a list.

Ted
-- 
 Ted Stern                           Engineering Applications
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 Debuggers' motto:  Frango ut patefacium -- I break in order to reveal