[TUHS] man-page style

[Grant Taylor]

On 12/1/18 7:44 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> I'm kinda with Grant on this one.  Maybe I misunderstood but what I 
> thought you did was treat the sendmail.cf as assembler for a weird 
> processor and then you wrote a higher level language that compiled 
> down to sendmail.cf.  Which, if that's that you did, is pretty studly. 
> I think Grant was asking what you did the higher level language in, 
> he was wondering if it was m4

Yep, that's what I was my interpretation and my question.

> (which I doubt, if I were doing that it would either be some nasty perl 
> script that I thought was going to be small but wasn't, or I'd just go 
> to lex/yacc/C).

One of these days I should find out the genesis of the m4 (.mc) file 
syntax that is used to generate the .cf file.

I'm curious why m4 was chosen over other languages.  I wonder what the 
other language options were.

I know that I learned m4 because of Sendmail's .mc file.  I've since 
started using m4 for a number of other things.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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