On 12/15/2024 2:17 PM, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2024-12-15T15:09:20-0500, John Levine wrote:
>>> On Sun, Dec 15, 2024 at 10:49 AM Marc Rochkind <mrochkind@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Incidentally, UNIX had a different language-independent macro processor
>>>> called m6. ...
>>
>>> Correction: The version of M6 for UNIX was called M4. Maybe because it was
>>> only 2/3 as complete?
>>
>> The Wikipedia article on macroprocessors says that M6 was written in
>> the 1960s by McIlroy, Morris, and Hall, based on GPM and Trac, written
>> in Fortran and ported to v2 Unix.
>>
>> M4 was written in the 1970s by Kernighan and Ritchie in C and is still
>> around, notably as impenetrable magic in GNU autoconfig and sendmail
>> config files. It looks a lot like GPM.
>
> Being aware of its reputation, I had some trepidation about using it,
> and found its impenetrability to be overstated.
>
> For a few years now I've used it to generate two man pages from a single
> source: groff_man(7) and groff_man_style(7).
>
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/tmac/groff_man.7.man.in?h=1.23.0
>
> The only thing I stubbed my toe on is m4's appropriation of common
> English words for its command language.  A prefix sigil before such
> words would have been a better choice.  But I got around that, too.
>
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/tmac/tmac.am?h=1.23.0#n252
>
> Regards,
> Branden

In 1997, when CSS was just beginning, long before
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_%28computer_language%29 was started in
2004, and subsequently illustrated m4 macros for creating HTML, I
started using m4 macros extensively to define Web pages in such a matter
that they could mimic appearance of other pages, and taught others at
our startup to use those macros, so that our customers could use our
software while retaining appearance consistent with the rest of their
pages. Another way to think of the macros is that they comprise a static
content management system – the content is stored in m4 files, which are
transformed into HTML in advance, vs. more dynamic page generation in a
typical content management system.
https://web.archive.org/web/19990125090055/http://hire.com/ describes
the software.
https://web.archive.org/web/19980209192647/http://www.eds.com/careers/overview/cr_overview.shtml,
https://web.archive.org/web/19990224005553/http://world4.hire.com/SVB/, and
https://web.archive.org/web/19990422144616/http://www.careerstop.org/job.htm
show remnants of customer pages created with those m4 macros.

More at
https://technologists.com/notes/2007/11/02/css-a-mans-got-to-know-his-limitations-2/


Charlie


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