On 05/29/2013 08:05 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
It's not a bad tool. I used it as a sort of PHP preprocessor, because requirements at work had me wanting to have a source file defining a PHP class and having an autogenerated section in the middle of that class. PHP's 'include' directive doesn't work for that. Of course, had we been using a better language, that wouldn't have been an issue (and it stopped being an issue when we improved the design and stopped using that class system, too, though I retained the makefile directives about building .php.m4 -> .php files). But still, GNU M4 is a decent piece of technology.
Agreed. The terror that most people feel when hearing "m4" is because m4 was associated with sendmail, not because m4 was inherently awful. It has problems, but you'd only encounter them when doing something _very_ abstract.
-- Erik Max Francis && m...@alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/ San Jose, CA, USA && 37 18 N 121 57 W && AIM/Y!M/Jabber erikmaxfrancis Substance is one of the greatest of our illusions. -- Sir Arthur Eddington -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
