| From: Peter Hiscocks via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | I learned the command line from a charming and very readable book: | 'Starting with Unix' by P.J.Brown. Interesting that you liked his writing. Many years ago (in the 1970s) I read the manual he produced for ML/1, his macroprocessor. I was startled at how well the manual worked, at least for me, at least at that time. Perhaps the best manual I have read. Apparently ML/1 was the result of his PhD research, completed in 1967. Computers back then were a quite different beasts. Still, I might consider using ML/1 now. Much more comfortable than M4. Most of the links here seem to be broken: <http://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/pjbrown/public_html/ml1/> This seems OK: <http://www.ml1.org.uk/> I noticed that they have a PDP-8 implementation. I thought that ML/1 into 4K words (of 12 bits) would be impossible. Turns out that they used two "fields" originally, and then three. So 8K and then 12K words. Still remarkable. The implementation of ML/1 is quite interesting. It was made to be portable and self-compiling. This is before C and UNIX. <http://www.ml1.org.uk/implementation.html>