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UW home Fox's home Updated: Jan 13, 1998  

M4 Macros

M4 was originally the preprocessor for ratfor. It is now used by fvwm and the configure script maker.

Here are a few, maybe useful M4 macros, taken from my SunExpert Q&AIX column, January, 1998.

Included are a for loop: for(var,start,end,procedure)

For example, 

   for(`x',1,5,`
     x squared = eval(x**2)')

expands to 

     1 squared = 1
     2 squared = 4
     3 squared = 9
     4 squared = 16
     5 squared = 25

There is also the sublime nextprime calculator, which expands to the next higher prime number from its argument: nextprime(number)

For example, 

     nextprime(50000)

expands to 

     50021
Get the macros as text, tools.m4, or in a compressed form, tools.m4.gz.

Jim Fox
UW Technology
Identity and Access Management
University of Washington
fox@washington.edu

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