Preprocessors and Macros

I have never encountered anything more pointless and stupid in my years of programming, EVER.

It's pretty much the only thing that holds me back from giving contributions to most open source C programs. Every source file is littered with #ifndefs every-fucking-where. 90% of the code is preprocessor directives and the rest is real C code. It's so fucking pointless and it's not even metaprogramming. I mean #define for using constants? Really? Can't you just use const for that? Sure, it's useful for separating your header files and relating functions in their source files but that's it. Dennis Ritchie should have just built that in the language. Sure, it's also useful compiling different lines of code for different kernel versions or different CFLAGS but whatever, it just proves how broken a programming language is.

What do you think /prog/? I've only parroting C shit, how does your favorite use macros?

>>16

Personally, I like Haskell's module system [...] and think it would be a good fit for C. But we can't change that language anymore.

The Clang people seem to disagree:

http://clang.llvm.org/docs/Modules.html

Much less ambitious but still useful would be to add an option (e.g. --protoize-with-compile) for compilers to autogenerate headers as a side effect of compilation. It's silly that programmers still have to extract this sort of information from the sources by hand.