ANSI C and the C Pre-Processor

[Henry Spencer]

> 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