Structured Fortran - was Re: Self modifying code, lambda calculus

[Chuck Guzis]

On 09/23/2015 02:27 PM, ben wrote:

> The 60's idea that MACROS could do that seems to have faded away.
> Ben.

It depends.  One very handy method is to devise a machine architecture, 
complete with registers and opcodes, and write the application code in 
macros, creating instruction words--and then run them using a small 
emulator for the devised machine.

After operation can be validated, re-code the macro bodies to generate 
native machine code instead of emulated fictitious machine instructions.

A way to get certain tasks done very quickly.

The C macro facility barely qualifies as such.  PL/I had a wonderful 
preprocessor; some assemblers were similarly versatile. For example, 
I've used an assembler that boasted support of arrays of structures of 
user-defined data types.  Now that was a macro facility.

--Chuck