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From: bomgard@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Tim Bomgardner)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: C preprocessing
Message-ID: <59770@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 21 Sep 90 18:07:20 GMT
Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington
Lines: 16

This is a philosophical/religious/semi-rhetorical question.  Wouldn't it
be nice, if in the following code the compiler would do what I meant
instead of what I said?  If I (and I'm sure everyone reading this) can
see exactly what is wanted, why can't a compiler?  Code is written two-
dimensionally--it has visual structure (at least mine does)--so why does
it have to processed as a one-dimensional string of tokens?  My personal
preprocessor (when I get around to writing it) will know exactly what to
do with this:

    if (bool_expression)
        do_something();
        do_something_else();
        if (another_bool_expression)
            do_anything();
    else
        do_this_when_bool_expression_is_false();