Examples of General Purpose Macro Processors
| Name | Year | Description |
|---|---|---|
| GPM | 1960s | One of the earliest macro processors was GPM (the General Purpose Macrogenerator). This was developed at the University of Cambridge, UK, in the mid 1960s. |
| ML/I | 1960s | One particularly important general purpose macro processor was (and still is) ML/I (Macro Language One). This was developed as part of PhD research by a Cambridge postgraduate, Peter J. Brown. ML/I operates on a character stream, and requires no special format for its input, nor any special flag characters to introduce macros. |
| STAGE2 | 1960s | A contemporary of ML/I was STAGE2, part of William Waite's Mobile Programming System. This too is a general purpose macro processor, but it processes input a line at a time, matching each line against specified patterns. |
| GMP | 1970s | Another attempt was the GMP (General Macro Processor) developed in the mid-1970s by M Boule in the DLB/GC department of the CII Company along ideas from R.J. Chevance. Tested in association with the Bordeaux I University the first version ran the SIRIS8/IRIS80 System. It was ported to mini6 systems and was the main component involved in the system generation for this family of computers. The GMP processor used C2-Chomsky grammars to define the syntax of macros and used and imperative language to execute computations and proceed to macro expansion. |
| gema | 1995 | gema is a contextual macro processor based on pattern matching, written by David N. Gray. It replaces/enhances the concept of regular expressions by contexts. Contexts roughly corresponds to named sets of patterns. As a consequence, macros in gema closely resemble an EBNF description. |
| GPP | 1996 | gpp is another general macro processor written by Denis Auroux. It resembles a C preprocessor, but has more general semantics and allows for customized syntax (for instance, TeX, XHTML, and Prolog-like scripts are definable). |
| pyexpander | 2011 | pyexpander is a general-purpose macro processor based on the Python programming language. In addition to simple macro replacement it allows evaluation of arbitrary Python expressions and execution of python code making pyexpander Turing complete. |
| XPOP | XPOP was another attempt at a general macro processing language by Mark Halpern at IBM in the 1960s. | |
| M4 | m4 was designed for Unix by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. | |
| minimac | minimac is a minimalist general purpose macro processor. It operates as a character stream filter, recursively expanding macros as they are encountered. It is unusual for a macro processor in that it uses an explicit argument stack, and user functions are defined by concatenation (similar to the Forth language). | |
| SNOBOL | 1960s | SNOBOL is a string processing language which is capable of doing most of the pre-processing which can be done by a macro processor. |
| ELENA | Software: Practice and Experience, Vol. 14, pp. 519–531, Jun. 1984 |
Read more about this topic: General Purpose Macro Processor
Famous quotes containing the words examples of, examples, general, purpose and/or processors:
“There are many examples of women that have excelled in learning, and even in war, but this is no reason we should bring ‘em all up to Latin and Greek or else military discipline, instead of needle-work and housewifry.”
—Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733)
“Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“And is the price for your acceptance for me to conform? To be as you would want me to be?... You must accept me as I am. Do not question.... If my behavior seems different perhaps it is because it serves a higher purpose than to find acceptance in this dull and useless world.”
—Pat Fielder, and Paul Landres. Dracula (Francis Lederer)
“The information links are like nerves that pervade and help to animate the human organism. The sensors and monitors are analogous to the human senses that put us in touch with the world. Data bases correspond to memory; the information processors perform the function of human reasoning and comprehension. Once the postmodern infrastructure is reasonably integrated, it will greatly exceed human intelligence in reach, acuity, capacity, and precision.”
—Albert Borgman, U.S. educator, author. Crossing the Postmodern Divide, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1992)