Talk:M4 (computer language)

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Isn't m4 usually written uncapitalised? This page is inconsistent within itself, and other wikipedia pages referencing it seem to use either upper or lower case. Personally, I favour lowercase but since it would be an edit to quite a few pages I thought I'd query first... pm215 23:36, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

It is usually lower case. Ar 22:20, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Why should macro processors have a special relation with assembly language? Is there anything to back up the statement that "Macro processors were prevalent when assembly language programming was the common tool of programmers"? Ar 22:50, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)

It's a historical relation brought on by the development path of computers. People wrote repetitive code, realized they could write code to do the repetitions for them, and they called that resultant meta-code a "macro processor." At the time, the code was primarily in assembly language and machine code. Compilers, when they had them, took too long to run. Further, higher-level languages don't typically suffer the repetitiveness of assembly (unless poorly written) therefore macro processors retain their association with the language. -- ke4roh 17:54, Sep 3, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Code example (needs attention)

The code example is incorrect; the output is not what is displayed on the page. "bye" is repeatedly recursively matched, leading to an infinite loop -- At least this is the case with Gnu m4.

That is fixed now. The more important problem was that the comma was not quoted properly so that define got the wrong number of arguments. Could someone fix the spurious spaces between the right-quotes in the replacement? I had to insert them in order to prevent interpretation as markup. Ar 19:30, 2004 Sep 21 (UTC)

It's still broken for me, it seems to need an extra pair of quotes around "bye". I'm going to try to replace the example with something less fragile. PeterDeWachter 17:26, 5 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Correct title

The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. The correct title is "m4 macro language".

Why not call it "M4 macro language" instead of "M4 (computer language)"?

Brianjd 03:10, Sep 30, 2004 (UTC)