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I need to hook in a preprocessor that runs before run/compile time, but I can't find any help on this. I already have some AutoIT code to read a file and replace my @ThisFileName macros with the actual source file being reprocessed. This macro will be used to emit the filename of the source file or my library UDFs. So, I want to run it when parsing each source file and each include file. I don't know how to hook my code into the run/build process. I was kind of looking for a tutorial or an example of installing the hooks.

I have been searching for a general purpose AutoIt macro preprocessor for some time. I've looked at all the existing implementations I could find, and researched two in detail: Shaggi's implementation of the C Preprocessor "mcpp" () kjactive's Au3PreProcessor (). But none of these are general enough in scope, or powerful enough in their macro expansion capabilities, to allow the rapid development of domain specific commands or the encapsulation of complex AutoIt constructs that I'm looking for. So, I am currently building a prototype AutoIt preprocessor (tentatively named "M4Au3") based on the GNU M4 macro processor (http://www.gnu.org/software/m4/). My goal is to provide a well defined set of built-in macros that extend the existing AutoIt "@Macro" syntax (but accept arguments) and to allow user defined macros in the same style, e.g. "@MyMacro( Arg1, Arg2 )". If anyone has already tried this approach, or something similar to it, I would be very interested in your results and suggestions.