I don't think Eric told me, and if he did, I forgot. In those days asm was often used for efficiency, as compilers weren't that good compared to hand-coded asm. He knew I'd purposely written the disassembler to produce MASM source code, and thought I'd enjoy hearing about the use he put it to (and I did!).

BTW, this anecdote is one of the reasons that I've strongly resisted adding macros to D.

Pretty sure this is also the reason why Anders never added macros to C# either.

FWIW, most large asm programs from back in the day relied heavily on macros just to have some semblance of abstraction.

I know. I did, too. But over time, I used the macros less and less. More than once I've used Eric's technique to figure out exactly wtf some wretched macro was actually doing.

I also purged my own C and C++ code of macro usage.