[COFF] Re: machine code translation,as mental architecture models

It appears that Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> said: Take a look at PL/I. Its preprocessor lets you use a large subset of PL/I including if, goto, and do loops and most of the string and arithmetic operators to write functions that run at compile time and put their results into the source file. And don't forget the IBM macro assembler. In macros along with all of the usual loops and local and global variables and subscripted parameters and conditional expressions and string processing, it had the AREAD op which read the next line from the source file and put it in a macro-time variable, thereby letting the macro define its own syntax from scratch if you wanted. There was also PUNCH to write a line directly to the object file.