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A comment on The Most Beautiful Piece of Code That Prints 42. Parent comment

Re:The Most Beautiful Piece of Code That Prints 42 by dynamicvariable on Sunday May 13, 2018 @07:31PM (#17061609)
Ever waste days debugging a subtle bug introduced by C macros? It's PTSD material.

I love C but I will never understand why C has a naive macro system.

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Re:The Most Beautiful Piece of Code That Prints 42 by anitil on Sunday May 13, 2018 @09:03PM (#17061960)
I always thought it was a historical choice that simple substitution languages were simpler to implement so were chosen as a default.

It is kind of infuriating that the preprocessor always feels simultaneously _too powerful_ and _not powerful enough_ for the jobs you want to get done. I find myself reaching for other tools (kaitai, m4 etc) a lot more these days to take the role.

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Re:The Most Beautiful Piece of Code That Prints 42 by dexen on Monday May 14, 2018 @03:19AM (#17063467)
The kenc[1] compiler subsequent to K&R C had much more constrained macro system exactly for those reasons. Thanks to advances in optimization and improved machine speed, it was reasonable to skip preprocessor-level const operations. Thanks to dead code elimination it was feasible to mostly give up conditional compilation.

[1] as used, for example, in Plan 9.

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