Re: Recording what we decided *not* to do, and why

[Russ Allbery]

Steve Simmons <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> m4.

> IMHO perl6 should continue the rich tradition of stealing from the best
> rather than re-inventing an only marginally better wheel.  m4 is better
> than cpp, and was intended to be a general macro package.  Are there
> versions available which are not strongly unfettered by license issues?

Yes, BSD m4 should be usable, and IIRC the OpenBSD version has sufficient
power to handle autoconf (which pounds the hell out of m4, much more so
than we'd be likely to).

However, cpp has the significant advantage that its active syntax is
designed to be embedded in a programming language and are Perl comments.
This is *not* true of m4, which would be horribly, horribly confused by a
Perl script.  m4 was not designed with embedding in a programming language
in mind, and lots of things like macro invocation syntax and default
quoting characters would interact very poorly with Perl.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>