News Release January 6, 2008

 

MacroExpressions is pleased to announce the release of Unimal 2.1 for Win32 and Linux platforms.

 

Unimal is an advanced language-independent macro processor (preprocessor); it helps programmers improve software quality and development process, helps improve code maintainability and helps optimize memory usage in a highly maintainable way.

 

This release improves usability, once again based on “wishlist” requests; it also runs faster. Version 2.1 is backward-compatible with versions 2.0c, 2.0b, 2.0a and 2.0.

 

About MacroExpressions

MacroExpressions is a sole proprietorship dedicated to developing original software tools. It is located in Acton, MA.

Contact:

For more information, contact Ark Khasin, akhasin@macroexpressions.com or (978) 930-1907.

 

Technical details:

Motivation

Generally, Unimal is reluctant to add new features because it wants to be very easy to learn. However, there is a balance to be found between being easy to learn and being easy to apply.

 

The features added to 2.1 come from the real-world experience and improve Unimal’s ease of use and ease of integration in complex build processes.

Command-line switches

Beginning with Unimal 2.1, the following command-line switch is allowed:

Recursive macro expansion

Added syntax to inform Unimal that a macro is suitable for recursive expansion so that it may be used recursively. This is useful in building e.g. constant tree-like data structures at compile time

Strings with arbitrary encoding

Added syntax and a method to compose Unimal strings with a pre-defined encoding. This is useful for sophisticated compile-time algorithms with the goal to optimize “text” output to non-standard devices.