.\"
.\"     cook - file construction tool
.\"     Copyright (C) 1990-1993, 1997, 2001, 2007, 2008 Peter Miller
.\"
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.\"     it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
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.\"     (at your option) any later version.
.\"
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.\"     MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
.\"     GNU General Public License for more details.
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.H 2 "Ancient History"
.B Cook
was originally developed because I was marooned on an operating
system without anything even vaguely resembling
\fImake\fP(1).
This was in 1988.
Since I had to write my own,
I added a few improvements.
When I finally escaped back to \s-4UNIX\s+4,
in 1990,
it took only two days to port
.B cook
to SystemV.
I have since deleted all code for that original operating system,
although clues to its identity are still present.
.P
After I had
.B cook
up on \s-4UNIX\s+4,
the progress the world had made caught up with me.
It was gratifying that
many of the features other make-oid authors had thought necessary
were either already present,
or easily and seamlessly added.
.P
.B Cook
was written with portability in mind.
This does not means it is entirely portable,
but it comes close.
.B Cook
has been tested on numerous \s-4UNIX\s+4 flavors.  This was made much
simpler in 1994 when I started using the GNU Autoconf utility.  This
means that when you obtain the sources for Cook, all you have to do is
run the \fIconfigure\fP script included in the distribution and Cook
will be configured for your system.  See the \f[CW]BUILDING\fP file in
the source distribution for more information.
.P
In 1996 Cook had internationalization support added, so that users could
have error messages and other warning and informational messages printed
in their native language.  This was made possible by the GNU Gettext
utilities.
.P
In 1997 Cook had a major re-write of significant portions of its
inference engine.  This enabled the addition of parallel processing
support, and simplified adding user-defined functions to the cookbook
language.