On 09/23/2015 02:27 PM, ben wrote:
The 60's idea that MACROS could do that seems to have faded away.
Ben.
It depends. One very handy method is to devise a machine architecture,
complete with registers and opcodes, and write the application code in
macros, creating instruction words--and then run them using a small
emulator for the devised machine.
After operation can be validated, re-code the macro bodies to generate
native machine code instead of emulated fictitious machine instructions.
A way to get certain tasks done very quickly.
The C macro facility barely qualifies as such. PL/I had a wonderful
preprocessor; some assemblers were similarly versatile. For example,
I've used an assembler that boasted support of arrays of structures of
user-defined data types. Now that was a macro facility.
--Chuck
