A syntax macro processor

Abstract

Since syntax macros are not new, a few words of justification for still another experiment are necessary. The origin is the following question: “In which language to program the software of electronic telephone exchanges?” Roughly, this is the known problem of choosing a language for software programming, i.e. a language which should be “high-level” to ensure reliability and hardware-oriented to ensure efficiency. Telephone exchanges however, have particularities of their own, two of which are worth mentioning. Firstly, no two exchanges are exactly alike, and this rules out plain assembly code. Secondly, the exchange builders know what they want but seem to have difficulties in expressing it in terms of algorithms. This means that designing at once another special purpose language was out of the question. Something flexible was needed. To provide for an immediately usable programming tool, a GPM-like macro generator [4] was put into service and is being used for producing software.