Solal, Ian is right, m4 corresponds better to what you've got in mind....
Your idea (strengthening the preprocessing phase) of C is already (mostly) implemented : it is called Cawen. Please have a look at : http://www.melvenn.com/en/cawen/why-cawen/ In short : C99 + m4 = Cawen And your idea is a very good one ! It is almost frightening to see what can be done with a little type introspection, a serious preprocessing phase, very few builtin patterns and good old C99 : namely all the C++ present and future magic tricks written in a more elegant style + a much more powerful templating system + a much easier profiling and runtime analysis (Cawen produces C, not C++)... Our first benchmarks aren't that bad : http://www.melvenn.com/en/google-benchmark/ http://www.melvenn.com/en/cawen/cawen-and-the-web-2/ At the moment, we lack resources to create an open source project and we use Cawen as an internal tool. Best regards TS & GC 2014-04-23 2:18 GMT+02:00 Ian Lance Taylor <i...@google.com>: > On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 9:38 AM, Solal <solal.rast...@me.com> wrote: >> >> I've got ideas for improve the preprocessor with specific features. >> >> The basic idea is to make the preprocessing language a complete >> programming language. > > We are very unlikely to add such features to GCC unless they first > become part of the C or C++ language standard. > > There are other preprocessors better suited for general purpose > programming, such as m4. > > Ian
