[gizmo686]

The input was a highly structured pdf specification of a family of protocols and formats. Essentially, a real language with very stupid parsing requirements and the occasional typo. The PDF itself was clearly intended for human consumption, but I'm 99% sure that someone somewhere at some point had a machine readable specification that was used to generate most of the PDF. Sadly, no one seems to know where to even start looking for such a thing.

> Did you or anyone else inform management that a code generator is essentially a compiler with extra characters?

The output of the code generator was itself fed into a compiler that we also built; and about half of the codegen team (myself included) were themselves developers for the compiler.

I think management is still scared from the 20 year old M4 monstrosity we are still maintaining because writing a compiler would be "too complex".