Re: Recent m4 CVS changes

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi Ted,

Ted Stern wrote:
> In about May of 2002, I forwarded to Gary some information about the M5
> project, some code developed by a now-deceased CS professor, Dain Samples,
> about a decade ago (pre GNU m4).
>
> I notice in recent GNU m4 CVS ChangeLog entries that there has been a flurry
> of feature addition in June and July.  Some of it is reminiscent of the M5
> stuff I forwarded.  I was curious whether it was something that you all had
> been developing independently or whether you were inspired by the ideas in the
> M5 document -- I'd like to hope so!

Absolutely.  There are some excellent ideas in Prof. Samples papers which 
definitely improve upon the usability of M4.  My current plans are to get a 
new release out the door as soon as possible, and then look at enhancing the 
core of GNU m4 as necessary to support a loadable M5 module that implements as 
much as practicable of M5.

> In any case, if you haven't done so already, it might be nice to add an
> acknowledgement of Dain Samples' influence.  Especially since the only other
> references to M5 that I turned up were in some Microsoft Research papers (who
> knows what else they do with it?  They certainly don't tell anybody when
> they're stealing ideas) -- with the recent SCO brouhaha, it couldn't hurt to
> establish a tie to pre-existing public domain code.

I haven't added any acknowledgements, but will be certain to do so well in 
advance of any release that uses Prof. Sample's work.

> Ted

Cheers,
        Gary.
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