[Top] [Contents] [Index] [ ? ]

GNU M4

This file documents GNU M4 1.4.4.

Copyright (C) 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 2004, 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the Foundation.

GNU m4 is an implementation of the traditional UNIX macro processor. It is mostly SVR4 compatible, although it has some extensions (for example, handling more than 9 positional parameters to macros). m4 also has builtin functions for including files, running shell commands, doing arithmetic, etc. Autoconf needs GNU m4 for generating `configure' scripts, but not for running them.

GNU m4 was originally written by René Seindal, with subsequent changes by No value for Francois Pinard and other volunteers on the Internet. All names and email addresses can be found in the file `THANKS' from the GNU m4 distribution.

This is release 1.4.4. It is now to be considered stable, future releases are only meant to fix bugs, increase speed, or improve documentation. However…

An experimental feature, which would improve m4 usefulness, allows for changing the syntax for what is a word in m4. You should use:

 
./configure --enable-changeword

if you want this feature compiled in. The current implementation slows down m4 considerably and is hardly acceptable. So, it might go away, do not count on it yet.


[Top] [Contents] [Index] [ ? ]

This document was generated by Super-User on November, 25 2007 using texi2html 1.76.