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Comment by chc4 | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that M4 was invented by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. GNU M4 might be what you're using, but it is definitely not the original version, and you probably shouldn't attribute M4 to GNU any more than you do C because they made GCC.

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"Invented" is a bit of a strong word here: there were "M" and "m3" macro processors before m4. Christopher Stratcheys GPM (General Purpose Macroprocessor, https://academic.oup.com/comjnl/article/8/3/225/336044) was the first macro processor where macros can occur anywhere in the source text - just like in m4. That makes it the first general such program, and not just the macro processor for some specific programming language (like the preprocessor of a macro assembler)

doesn't help that gnu manual pages & documentation tend to completely ignore the origins of the tool they are emulating

(compare HISTORY sections of BSD userland vs GNU coreutils ones as one simple example)

Part of the point of GNU was to be a fresh implementation with no copyright dependency on Unix.

That doesn’t preclude acknowledging the history of the tool.

... which would be essentially plagiarism in other fields.

The GNU M4 manual has a sizable section acknowledging its precursors: https://www.gnu.org/software/m4/manual/m4.html#History

perhaps the full manual, but the manual page (which is what I specifically mentioned) has quite the opposite:

    $ man gm4 |sed -ne 119,121p
    AUTHOR
           Written by Rene' Seindal.

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