This is a script called m5.awk that I randomly found after reading a paper about it on the ACM website. The paper’s worth reading too but the script is just a piece of work. Commented to the brim, clean, and most importantly, useful as hell. it could be a replacement for m4. It allows you to embed AWK in text files, and besides that, it allows you to use several preprocessng features that it offers via macros. Give it a try.
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So I am going to explain the concept of macro preprocessors to you — m5.awk is a macro preprocessor, so is m4 so is GPP so is C’s CPP, so is my Ekipp and so is my AllocPP.pl. They all work like this:
1- Frank Frankis (hereby referred to as FF) creates a file called
my-file.randext
—randext
here meaning that macro prerpcoessors work on all kind of files, be it a C code, a Python code, an HTML template, your tax files, your notes to your GF, your angry letter to your boss, etc;2- There are dozens and dozens of uses for a macro preprocessors, but let’s say FF wants to obliterate two birds with one sniper shot, he wishes to write a manual for his new Car XAshtray ™, in HTML and Markdown, but he wants it to be contained within one single file – and he wishes to reuse certain fragments of text, certain HTML tags, certain Markdown syntaxes, to be ‘reusable’, just like a ‘function’ is reusable piece of code in an imperative language (but not a functional language!) or how a template works in C++, etc.
3- FF enters the file with his favorite text editor. He defines these ‘functions’, which are the ‘macro’ part of a macro preprocessor. Think what ‘macro’ means. It means ‘big picture’ basically. I think the better term here is ‘meta’. These two words have a close relationship in the English language, don’t they?
Now let’s see what macro preprocessor FF uses. Since GPP is really similar in syntax to C’s preprocessor (at least with default settings) let’s use GPP. I would use my Ekipp here but I honestly have forgotten the syntax (believe it or not, creating a language does not mean you are good at it).
FF keeps defining these. Now comes writing the actual manual.
Keep in mind that GPP stands for ‘Generic Preprocessor’, it’s a text macro prerpcoessor and not a language preprocessor like CPP (C’s preprocessor) is. m4 and Ekipp are like that. My AllocPP.pl is a language preprocessor, it preprocesses C. So now, this means FF can now freely treat
my-file.randext
as a text file, with a ‘language’, the Macro Preprocessor language, defining the output (I’ll talk about what I mean by ‘output’ soon).So he writes his manual:
Replace the last ellipse with rest of the text, the Car Ashtray manual.
Now, FF needs to ‘preprocess’ this text file. This is, well, the ‘preprocessing’ part of a macro preprocessor. It’s like compiling a program with a compiler, except you are compiling text-to-text instead of text-to-binary.
gpp -DMyMacro=MyValue my-file.randext > my-manual.md
#! delimexec $ ‘‘awk “{ print $1; }”’’ | <== foo bar ==>
sudo apt-get install libreadline-dev libgc-dev libunistring-dev wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Chubek/Ekipp/master/install.sh | sudo sh
Thanks, I appreciate your effort a lot and I understand the usecase now!