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From: maart@cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Macro facility in csh?
Message-ID: <3117@solo12.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 1 Sep 89 21:28:58 GMT
References: <8998@zodiac.ADS.COM>
Organization: V.U. Informatica, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Lines: 43

charleen@zodiac.ADS.COM (Charleen Bunjiovianna) writes:
\I may be asking for too much, but I write a lot of csh scripts and
\it sure would be handy to have macro capability.  I don't find any
\mention of it in the documentation, though.

There always has been a macro facility (!):

	set	foo = bar
	... $foo ... $foo ... $foo ...

Allright, you want macros with PARAMETERS: well, why don't you filter your
script through `/lib/cpp -P' before passing it to the shell?

If you would use *Bourne* shell scripts, you could even define shell FUNCTIONS:

	foo()
	{
		...
	}
	... foo ...

If you're stuck with an old version of the Bourne shell, try the following
trick:
	foo='
		case $1 in
		bar)
			date
			;;
		pipo)
			who
		esac
	'
	...
	set bar; eval "$foo"
	set pipo; eval "$foo"

In fact, this is the way functions were implemented at first: the shell would
set the arguments you gave and eval the function shell variable.
The problem: the (global) positional parameters get overwritten on each call,
making nested functions somewhat `tricky'...
-- 
C, the programming language that's the same |Maarten Litmaath @ VU Amsterdam:
         in all reference frames.           |maart@cs.vu.nl, mcvax!botter!maart