On Wed, 8 Sep 2021 00:24:44 +0100, Alan Gauld via Python-list
<python-list@python.org> declaimed the following:
>
>That was quite common in C before it became popular(early/mid 80s).
>I've seen Pascal, Algol and Coral macro sets in use.
>You could even download pre-written ones from various
>bulletin boards (remember them?!) for a while.
And if one wants to expose themselves to real horror -- look at the
output of one of those "structured FORTRAN" preprocessors (RATFOR, TEXTFOR,
others) that were cropping up in the late 70s to generate FORTRAN-IV from
code written with block IF, WHILE, etc.
I spent close to 20 years (80s-90s) maintaining the /output/ of such a
preprocessor. The software had apparently originated with a sub-contractor,
and we did not have access to their preprocessor (and/or no one ported it
to the VAX-11 from PDP-11).
At first my practice was to study a file in detail, and then rewrite it
using F77 with separately compiled subroutines (the preprocessor was "one
file per program" and implemented BASIC-style GOSUB, relying on shared
variables and ASSIGNed GOTO for the return address -- I had to move the
shared variables to COMMON blocks to make separate subroutines usable).
By the end of those decades, I'd been exposed to the preprocessor
enough to hand-write smaller patches within its style. The only good thing
is that is left the structured source as comments, and tended to
right-justify the F-IV output, so easy to locate...
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Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN
wlfr...@ix.netcom.com http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/
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