Conversation

@zwol M4 always was horrible, and I say that as the original author of GNU M4.

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.

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.