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GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool
book

GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool

by Gary V. Vaughan, Ben Elliston, Tom Tromey, Ian Lance Taylor
October 2000
Intermediate to advanced
432 pages
9h 9m
English
Sams
Content preview from GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool

20.3. Fundamentals of M4 Processing

When properly understood, M4 seems like child's play. It is common to learn M4 in a piecemeal fashion, however, and to have an incomplete or inaccurate understanding of certain concepts. Ultimately, this leads to hours of furious debugging. It is important to understand the fundamentals well before progressing to the details.

20.3.1. Token Scanning

m4 scans its input stream, generating (often, just copying) text to the output stream. The first step that m4 performs in processing is to recognize tokens. There are three kinds of tokens:

NamesA name is a sequence of characters that starts with a letter or an underscore and may be followed by additional letters, characters, and underscores. The end of a name ...
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