Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) Newsgroups: net.lang.c Subject: Re: Re: ANSI C and the C Pre-Processor Message-ID: <4404@utzoo.UUCP> Date: Tue, 2-Oct-84 12:40:26 EDT Article-I.D.: utzoo.4404 Posted: Tue Oct 2 12:40:26 1984 Date-Received: Tue, 2-Oct-84 12:40:26 EDT References: <9110@watmath.UUCP>, <5700017@ea.UUCP> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 21 > Great. Another tool that's nearly vital for writing C, but not available > on most (all) non-Unix systems. Anybody got pointers to a public domain > m4? Gee, I've never found any of the stuff under discussion (token concatenation and substitution inside strings) either "nearly vital" or even particularly useful. The new string-constant-concatenation feature would answer the one or two places where I've wanted to use such things. My point is not that these features aren't useful in some sense -- it is quite possible that I just haven't encountered the particular situations where they are useful -- but that they are not, in any realistic sense, "nearly vital" for writing C. The existence of active C programmers who have never used them and don't miss them is notable, as is the existence and continuing use of C compilers that don't implement them. I don't know of a public-domain m4, but there are public-domain macro processors of other kinds. -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry