Re: More Complex preprocessors

Aaron Ucko (UCKO@vax1.rockhurst.edu)
Tue, 13 Feb 1996 15:42:37 -0600 (CST)

>Hi All,
>
>Every so often I keep wishing that C/C++ had a decent macro preprocessor
>of the order of most macro-assemblers. I've had a play around with the
>different tools available and cannot find anything that really suits me.
>
>Can anyone suggest anything?
>
>Here is what I have looked at so far.
>
>1) m4 This does give me much of what I want, however the m4 commands
> use words which could easily be used in the c code (shift, eval,
> index, len, etc...) causing all kinds of possible bugs.
>
> I would prefer each preprocessor line to be obvious ie starting
> with # or some other flag.

The fvwm sources contain an m4 file to rename all m4 identifiers to start
with (I seem to recall) an underscore; a modified version of this macro
(to use something like _m4_ as the prefix) might work.

What would be _really_ nice, though, would be something like TeX's "mouth."
Everything special begins with an escape character (\ in TeX, perhaps # in
tcpp), and almost completely arbitrary syntax is legal.

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