A Proposal for Compile-Time Facilities

A novel, simple scheme for providing compile-time facilities to PL/I programmers is proposed. The scheme emphasizes language unity and implementation ease at the expense of syntactic nicety. A similar approach is possible in high-level languages other than PL/I, assuming they include adequate character string processing facilities. This paper describes the scheme, and attempts to analyze its advantage and shortcomings. Keywords and Phrases: macros, macro processing, compile-time facilities, compile time macros, compiler macros, high level language macros