> someone at Bell Labs "Kernighan and Ritchie then joined forces to develop the original m4, described in “The M4 Macro Processor” Those nobodies. What were t

> someone at Bell Labs "Kernighan and Ritchie then joined forces to develop the original m4, described in “The M4 Macro Processor” Those nobodies. What were they thinking? > for no other greater purpose than to scratch a personally itch "The Brian Kernighan and P.J. Plauger book Software Tools, Addison-Wesley (1976), describes and implements a Unix macro-processor language, which inspired Dennis Ritchie to write m3"[1] "Originally, the Kernighan and Plauger macro-processor, and then m3, formed the engine for the Rational FORTRAN preprocessor, that is, the Ratfor equivalent of cpp. Later, m4 was used as a front-end for Ratfor, C and Cobol."[1] If the m3/m4 folks wrote a whole "Software Tools" book and then used m4 as a front-end for multiple languages, it sounds like it served a useful purpose. [1] GNU M4 manual section 1.2, "Historical References"