Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!mcnc!duke!romeo!crm
From: crm@romeo.cs.duke.edu (Charlie Martin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: goodbye cpp ??? (macros vs. inline functions)
Summary: no cpp doesn't imply no conditional compilation
Message-ID: <12903@duke.cs.duke.edu>
Date: 22 Nov 88 14:53:38 GMT
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 I want to throw in one quibble into the discussion of eliminating cpp.

 Several people have suggested that eliminating cpp would mean giving
 up conditional compilation, and I want to point out that this just
 isn't so.  There is no reason why the scanner can't handle conditional
 compilation as well, just as comments are handled.  Nested
 conditionals means putting a little more smarts into the scanner, but
 the loss in performance in the scanner is almost certainly less than
 the loss of having a whole nother compilation phase.  AND it means
 there doesn't need to be two phases for scanning, two parsers, two
 symbol tables, two "code generators" etc etc.

 The VMS C compiler (for all its other problems) does this, I believe.
Charlie Martin (crm@cs.duke.edu,mcnc!duke!crm)