<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://hackers.town/@zwol" class="u-url mention">@<span>zwol</span></a></span> M4 always was horrible, and I say that as the original author of GNU M4.</p><p>The original Unix M4 was weird, and there weren't really any good explanations for why it was the way it was. Apparently someone at Bell labs needed a preprocessor and wrote M4, sometimes in the '70, for no other greater purpose than to scratch a personally itch.</p><p>GNU M4 only exists because RMS wanted GNU to have what Unix had, and while I wanted to do something different and better, RMS convinced me to do M4 first.</p>
