Python #ifdef

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 9:57 AM, Erik Max Francis <max at alcyone.com> wrote:
> On 05/29/2013 08:05 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>> It's not a bad tool. I used it as a sort of PHP preprocessor, because
>> requirements at work had me wanting to have a source file defining a
>> PHP class and having an autogenerated section in the middle of that
>> class. PHP's 'include' directive doesn't work for that. Of course, had
>> we been using a better language, that wouldn't have been an issue (and
>> it stopped being an issue when we improved the design and stopped
>> using that class system, too, though I retained the makefile
>> directives about building .php.m4 -> .php files). But still, GNU M4 is
>>
>> a decent piece of technology.
>
>
> Agreed.  The terror that most people feel when hearing "m4" is because m4
> was associated with sendmail, not because m4 was inherently awful. It has
> problems, but you'd only encounter them when doing something _very_
> abstract.

Ah. I actually wasn't aware of m4's use with sendmail. I first met it
as the aforementioned PHP preprocessor, simply by Googling for
something along the lines of "generic preprocessor". First hit solved
my problems.

ChrisA