General Purpose Macro Processor
Encyclopedia
A general purpose macro processor is a macro processor that is not tied to or integrated with a particular language or piece of software.
A macro processor is a program that copies a stream of text from one place to another, making a systematic set of replacements as it does so. Macro processors are often embedded in other programs, such as assemblers and compilers. Sometimes they are standalone programs that can be used to process any kind of text.
Macro processors have been used for language expansion (defining new language constructs that can be expressed in terms of existing language components), for systematic text replacements that require decision making, and for text reformatting (e.g. conditional extraction of material from an HTML
file).
A macro processor is a program that copies a stream of text from one place to another, making a systematic set of replacements as it does so. Macro processors are often embedded in other programs, such as assemblers and compilers. Sometimes they are standalone programs that can be used to process any kind of text.
Macro processors have been used for language expansion (defining new language constructs that can be expressed in terms of existing language components), for systematic text replacements that require decision making, and for text reformatting (e.g. conditional extraction of material from an HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
file).
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 ML/I ML/1 is a powerful general purpose macro processor.Typical uses of ML/1 include:* editing, modifying, correcting, or reformatting text files* translating source code from one programming language to another... (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 | 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 | gema is a contextual macro processor based on pattern matching. 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 | 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 TeX TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as .... , XHTML XHTML XHTML is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely-used Hypertext Markup Language , the language in which web pages are written.... , and Prolog Prolog Prolog is a general purpose logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is declarative: the program logic is expressed in terms of... -like scripts are definable). |
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| pyexpander | 2011 | pyexpander is a general purpose macro processor based on the Python Python (programming language) Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive... programming language. In addition to simple macro replacement it allows evaluation of arbitrary python expressions and execution of python code making pyexpander Turing Complete Turing completeness In computability theory, a system of data-manipulation rules is said to be Turing complete or computationally universal if and only if it can be used to simulate any single-taped Turing machine and thus in principle any computer. A classic example is the lambda calculus... . |
| XPOP | XPOP was another attempt at a general macro processing language by Mark Halpern at IBM in the 1960s. | |
| M4 | m4 M4 (computer language) m4 is a general purpose macro processor designed by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. m4 is an extension of an earlier macro processor m3, written by Ritchie for the AP-3 minicomputer.-Use:... was designed for Unix Unix Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna... by Brian Kernighan Brian Kernighan Brian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed to the development of Unix. He is also coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. The 'K' of K&R C and the 'K' in AWK both stand for... and Dennis Ritchie Dennis Ritchie Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie , was an American computer scientist who "helped shape the digital era." He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the UNIX operating system... . |
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| 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 SNOBOL SNOBOL is a generic name for the computer programming languages developed between 1962 and 1967 at AT&T Bell Laboratories by David J. Farber, Ralph E. Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky, culminating in SNOBOL4... 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 |