Thanks Grant, here's some context on what I'm working on and what I tried.
I'm using m4 as the macro processor of an Intel 8080 cross-assembler
I'm developing in Python
(nothing fancy, I'm a hobbyist). I'd like to write macros for
generating unique Assembly labels that
would be good approximations of local labels.
An approach is to generate the labels from the unique values of a
global counter, hence my question.
I'm thinking of something like:
define(`nextlabel', `L'nextcount)
nextlabel:
mvi a, 3
My initial attempt was like this:
define(`COUNTER', `0')
define(`newlabel', ``$1'incr(COUNTER)')
But this is ineffective as no global COUNTER can be referenced. Then I
tried this:
define(`newlabel', pushdef(`COUNTER', `incr(COUNTER)')`$1'COUNTER)
which generates an infinite loop. Another approach I tried is to fetch
a unique integer from outside
of m4 via esyscmd:
define(`newlabel', `$1'esyscmd(`date +"%s"|tr -d "\n"'))
This aborts m4 with an internal error and %s isn't granular enough
anyway. A variation on esyscmd
I experimented with is:
define(`newlabel',`$1'esyscmd(`echo $RANDOM|tr -d "\n"'))
Which returns an empty string.
Paolo
