3 ms·

I'm not sure. I get the impression with such old-school macro languages (like M4) you have to use a lot of quoting tricks, evaluation order hacks, and use low l

by 1wd 8y ago

I'm not sure. I get the impression with such old-school macro languages (like M4) you have to use a lot of quoting tricks, evaluation order hacks, and use low level primitives like divert and dnl to build up even the simplest of useful things. Many scripts seem to start by inventing a looping construct. While modern templating systems (like Jinja2 or T4) use a proper programming language (like Python or C#) so using even high-level constructs and complex data models is trivial.

yayana 8y ago
I think this last paragraph is a bit misleading: > use a proper programming language m4 is a small proper language that can be used directly. jinja2 is a DSL written in python that doesn't actually have access to much of python. m4 is harder to work with in the domain (quoting, escaping, and data modeling) since it is a general purpose language, but it is easier to do general purpose processing tasks with m4 if they violate the stereotypes of what should be done in the domain.