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(m4.info)History

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Historical references
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   The historical notes included here are fairly incomplete, and not
authoritative at all.  Please knowledgeable users help us to more
properly write this section.

   `GPM' has been an important ancestor of `m4'.  See C. Stratchey: "A
General Purpose Macro generator", Computer Journal 8,3 (1965), pp. 225
ff.  `GPM' is also succintly described into David Gries classic
"Compiler Construction for Digital Computers".

   While `GPM' was _pure_, `m4' was meant to deal more with the true
intricacies of real life: macros could be recognized with being
pre-announced, skipping whitespace or end-of-lines was made easier,
more constructs were builtin instead of derived, etc.

   Originally, `m4' was the engine for Rational FORTRAN preprocessor,
that is, the `ratfor' equivalent of `cpp'.