16 Dec
2024
16 Dec
'24
2:09 a.m.
On Sun, Dec 15, 2024 at 10:49 AM Marc Rochkind
<mrochkind(a)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.
As an old Trac user I'd be interested to hear what M6 was like. The
Wikipedia article has a footnote pointing to a book by A J Cole, but I
found a copy of the book and it says nothing about M6 and has only a
passing reference to McIlroy.
R's,
John