Re: m4-discuss Digest, Vol 72, Issue 1

[John Allsup]

I've had a little think about this.  The simplest problem I can set you 
m4 people is the task of writing
a simple macro driven input that does the following:

Given a source file in1.m4 which contains the following:
    A word can expand to many things.
and the file def.m4 which contains
    define(word,term)define(many,a great `many')
the challenge is to generate the output
    The phrase 'A word can expand to many things' may be expanded to 
the following.
        A term can expand to a great many things.
using the simplest m4 input possible and by referring to the contents of 
the file via inclusion so that
if the contents of the input file change, the output changes accordingly.

Have a think.

John


On 18/07/11 03:57, John Calcote wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> I see exactly what you want, but I'm not sure what you're asking for is
> reasonable. Why would you want to run a file though a macro processor and
> not have it process any macros? Given your original input files, "a" and
> "b", consider this sequence of commands:
>
> cat a | m4>  out.txt
> cat b>>  out.txt
>
> This would see to accomplish exactly what you want, wouldn't it?
>
> Regards,
> John Calcote
>
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>     1. Simple method of including a file that bypasses macro
>        expansion (John Allsup (M4))
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> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2011 08:15:04 +0100 (BST)
> From: "John Allsup (M4)"<address@hidden>
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Simple method of including a file that bypasses macro
>         expansion
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>
> Hi,
> ?
> I am relatively new to m4, but can't seem to find an equivalent to include
> that bypasses macro expansion.
> ?
> Suppose file 'a' contains
> ? hello world
> and file 'b' contains
> ? goodbye world
> and in my m4 I have defined
> ? define(world,and).
> I a macro which I will call 'oinclude' such that ? include(a) oinclude(b)
> expands to ? hello and goodbye world.
>
> Is there a simple method?
> ?
> Thanks,
> ?
> John?
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