I"d like a macro-processor as in classic book "software-tools". Re: What"s better than Te

Man, would it be nice to have available a macro processor
basically like the one developed in the classic Kernighan
book "Software Tools" (the red, ie fortran, one).

Way back in the 70's, well before Unix (TM) was allowed
outside of AT&T Bell Labs, Kernighan came up with a
very unix-like shell, grep, cat, comm, you name it,
and it got a big following, one branch out of
Lawrence Berkeley Labs (vax) and the other
out of U. of Arizona (Dec 10 & 20), and with
lots of improvements (over the book version) for
a lot of the tools.

(All the tools were written in "Ratfor", a very-C-like language
that was "compiled" into Fortran.)

I paid someone to greatly enhance the macro-processor, but
somehow after Sun came out with "real" unix (bsd+), that
stuff ***stupidly*** lost (by me and by others).

It was far better than the current m4.



Anyway, a simple macro language, where args are passed
by *position* in an arg list (as in normal languages),
very concise, very nice.


Anyone know of such a thing these days?


Thanks,

David