My advice on implementing stuff in C: [LWN.net]

My advice on implementing stuff in C:

Posted Oct 19, 2010 11:40 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: My advice on implementing stuff in C: by HelloWorld
Parent article: Russell: On C Library Implementation

The C preprocessor is just as extralinguistic as those code generators

While it seems so from cpp's quite remarkable lack of expressive power, it actually isn't possible to write a C preprocessor that is truly extralinguistic, because (as you yourself said), it operates on a token stream, not a character stream. It really is integrated into the language: the problem is that it's mostly (but not entirely) bolted onto the front end of it, as befits something that at one point was an extralinguistic addon that operated on character streams.