Mokvino

Experimental m4 alternative

Files

Description

I wanted to try out some ideas with the macro processor m4, and so I wrote my own to experiment with. It's not complete (still experimental, and might stay that way), and not a drop-in replacement, but it's here for those who are interested.

Mokvino has the following features:

• Hard quotes and Unicode escape sequences are supported through the use of a preprocessor, which converts the input string into a hierarchical structure according to the level of soft quoting.

  There are also quotes which strip leading and trailing internal white space.

• Named arguments are supported to allow flexibility in the order of arguments. Named arguments can also be given default values, or be initialized from the initial positional arguments.

• Most of the built-in macros, those which generate output for further processing, have a default argument which allows the output to be surrounded by extra quotes.

• There are new replacement marks (such as $!?@) to help to deal with named arguments and other improvements.

• Output can be switched to different files during the processing. External post-processors can be applied to each of these files, controlled by the input script.

• Mokvino can automatically generate dependency rules by keeping track of input and output files. It can also be made to write a file only if its contents have changed, list generated files, and remove files it generated previously if not regenerated.