Nice... Just what I was looking for.

[SteveB]

I written and used macro processors for a long time. It continues to
amaze me that more programmers don't have MPs in their tool kit.
Minimac is very cool.

The use of stacks is inspired. It really short circuits a lot of
problems with ugly and clumsy
macro call formatting, and in practice works very smoothly.

Here are some comments after a small amount of use (generating
multiple versions of
HTML snippet files and CSS files). In no particular order:

* Manual section "3.7 Ignoring Whitespace within a definition" -- you
might want to move up into
section "3.1 Defining macros" so it's available immdiately for more
interesting examples.

* Plans page #11, "discontinue using brackets as special chars". Not
clear whether this means
just to replace with other characters or to invent a way that their
"ignoring whitespace" function
is provided in another way... just curious.`

* Should section 5.11 "Reserved special characters" and Append A
"Special characters"
mention {wsoff!} and {wson!} and '[' and ']' ?

* The other "Plans" all look sensible.

-- SteveB

Environmental things that would be useful, and easy to implement:

* Short definitions on the command line, though with a differnent
syntax, perhaps,
to make it more shell friendly.

* Builtin function {env} (name -- value), that looked up an
environment variable.

[mwh]

Hi Steve,

Thanks so much for trying Minimac and for kicking off the Google
group.
I've responded to your feedback item by item below.

On May 25, 4:06 am, SteveB <stevebeis...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I written and used macro processors for a long time. It continues to
> amaze me that more programmers don't have MPs in their tool kit.
> Minimac is very cool.
>
> The use of stacks is inspired. It really short circuits a lot of
> problems with ugly and clumsy
> macro call formatting, and in practice works very smoothly.

That's nice to hear, not everyone is comfortable with RPN and explicit
stacks,
it tends to make some things simpler, at the expense of occasionally
requiring some juggling of stack items by the user.

> Here are some comments after a small amount of use (generating
> multiple versions of
> HTML snippet files and CSS files). In no particular order:
>
> * Manual section "3.7 Ignoring Whitespace within a definition" -- you
> might want to move up into
> section "3.1 Defining macros" so it's available immdiately for more
> interesting examples.

Sounds good, I'll do that.

> * Plans page #11, "discontinue using brackets as special chars". Not
> clear whether this means
> just to replace with other characters or to invent a way that their
> "ignoring whitespace" function
> is provided in another way... just curious.`

I'm concerned that by choosing bracket characters to toggle the
ignoring of whitespaces in definitions, any literal brackets now have
to be escaped within a definition. Since brackets are so common in
programming languages, I'd like to come up with a less intrusive way
of achieving the same effect.

> * Should section 5.11 "Reserved special characters" and Append A
> "Special characters"
> mention {wsoff!} and {wson!} and '[' and ']' ?

Thanks for pointing out the omission, I'll correct it today.

> * The other "Plans" all look sensible.

Most of the plans are just food for thought for the moment.

> Environmental things that would be useful, and easy to implement:
>
> * Short definitions on the command line, though with a differnent
> syntax, perhaps, to make it more shell friendly.
>
> * Builtin function {env} (name -- value), that looked up an
> environment variable.

Both sound good to me, I'll add them to the `plans' list.

There's a few features I've held off on so far, including command line
parameters, piping the output from {shell} into a variable,
environment variables, directories, and 'safe' temporary files. The
main reason being that I need to do some research to make sure I know
how to implement them in an OS independent way, either that or I'll
have to abandon OS independence and make Minimac Unix-only software.

Thanks again for your feedback, appreciate it.

Cheers,
Mark