johnl (09/09/82)
GPM for General Purpose Macrogenerator was written by
Christopher Strachey about fifteen years ago. He wrote an article
on it in the Computer Journal (the major British computer magazine,
most tech libraries have it) volume 3 or 4, I think.
GPM was no big deal and was about as powerful as the C
preprocessor, although the style was quite different. It looked a
lot like Trac language, developed independently by Cal Mooers about
the same time.
The structure of GPM was simple enough that it looked like only
a day or two's work to implement. I would be interested to hear
from anybody else on the net using interesting macroprocessors,
particularly Trac. (If you're using a PDP-11 Trac processor, it
probably has my fingerprints on it.)
John Levine, decvax!cca!ima!johnl, harpo!esquire!ima!johnl (uucp)
Levine@YALE (Arpa), 617-491-5450 (desperation)wje (09/10/82)
c peaking of macro processors, there was one called stage2, developed by Waite about ten years ago. Although I haven't used it for anything of any importance, I have seen some rather impressive things done with it. It's roughly of the class of awk, but more powerful (I've seen an optimizer for assembler written in stage2 macros that does GLOBAL optimization!). It was described in 'Implementing Software for Non-Numeric Applications' by William Waite, Prentice-Hall. What this leads up to is, we have stage2 written in C for Unix. If anyone is interested, just tell me where to send it. Bill Ezell Software Innovations, Inc (decvax,ittvax,harpo)!sii!wje