Doxygen for GNU M4 language

Question

Is it possible to document GNU M4 macros with Doxygen or something similar?

We have a large collection of macros and would like to document them in comments and generate documentation from that (similar to Doxygen, JavaDoc, etc.)

Thanks!

Answer 1

No, this is impossible, the reason being that doxygen needs to parse the document according to some grammar. Because m4 is a general purpose macro processor it can process any kind of text file and is not restricted to a particular grammar at all. Even if all your m4 files were actually C, doxygen would need to parse a hybrid of m4 and C, which it can't. Doxygen is restricted to its supported languages, as outlined in the doxygen documentation.