Catalogue description General Purpose Macrogenerator (GPM)   In an autobiographical note written in 1971,...

General Purpose Macrogenerator (GPM)

In an autobiographical note written in 1971, Strachey described this as follows

An interesting byproduct of the work on CPL and its compiler was the General Purpose Macrogenerator which is in effect a simple but very general string processor. This program has now been implemented in almost every country in which computing is a research subject - I certainly know of implementations in Australia, Japan, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Holland as well as several in England and America. It gives an elegant example of the use of a stack and shows the power of functional composition to construct complicated operations from simple primitives. It is not, however, of any very deep theoretical interest and I now regard it as a rather beguiling time-waster.

See also CSAC 71.1.80/F.32.