Writing Something Big
Search the Web for “small-size project in m4.” (Admit that any project in the “Writing Something Big” sections so far was not really big but barely bigger than tiny!) You’ll find many ideas that boil down to one: using m4 to generate text in X from text in Y, where X is usually LaTeX or HTML, and Y is some other notation, such as Markdown.[27] This discovery affirms the language’s preprocessing nature and makes choosing a “big” project difficult. Nobody wants yet another HTML code generator.
Fortunately, being Turing-complete, m4 can do much more. For example, it can model finite state automata (FSA), also known as finite state machines (FSM).
An FSA is a mathematical apparatus for modeling finite-state systems—systems ...
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