Why does Imake interpret certain words in a Imakefile to numerical values?

Question

I've found it very difficult to find any existing documentation on this. What I'm trying to find out is why Imake would interpret a word such as "unix", "linux" or "i386" to a number 1 in the produced Makefile? I'm sure it is a function of indicating whether or not your on that system or not. I've not been able to find that this is a #define set somewhere, so is this something that's built in?

Answer 1

imake produces Makefiles by running cpp, the C preprocessor, which usually has a variety of builtin definitions. You can get a list by running gcc -E -dM emptyfile.c.