[COFF] ancient macros, machine code translation, as mental architecture models

[John Levine]

It appears that Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu> said:
>In 1959, ...

>We never considered anything but recursive expansion, where macro
>definitions can contain macro calls; thus the TX-0 model comes as quite a
>surprise. We kept a modest stack of the state of each active macro
>expansion. We certainly did not foresee that within a few years some
>applications would need a 70-level stack!

As the PDP-1 Macro imeplementation manual said about the macro feature:

   It is the weakest
  in that it is quite inflexible and does not incorporate any of the more significant improvements
  in assembler technology that have occurred since the logic was first written in 1957.

The PDP-1 was not a very big machine, only 4K words and the only
standard I/O device was paper tape, so no overlays or multiple passes.
I can imagine that while they knew how to write a better macro
processor, they didn't want to use up the memory it would have needed.

Bitsavers has a bunch of memos about the TX-0.

Memo 39 describes TX-0 assembler as of 1962, which had real macros
that could insert arbitrary strings, as they show in an example on
pages 10-11.

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/tx-0/memos/M-5001-39_MIDAS_Nov62.pdf

There are earlier memos about MACRO in 1959 and 1961 which suggest a weaker
macro facility but don't have details.

R's,
John