>>671) Lisp has full control (ie, controlled by plain Lisp functions) of how characters are converted to tokens, and how tokens are converted or manipulated before hitting the compiler. It is a real programming language manipulating tokens as real data structures, not a bunch of shell-like string hacks. You know nothing of what Lisp is or does, and are making a complete jackass of yourself by attempting to hold little pieces of shit above it.
2) Every Lisp compiler already does constant folding, dead code elmination, and all that. If something is unused, it costs nothing. And in a much better implementation than you'll pull off in preprocessor expansion hacks. Will cpp even have a notion of type inference? (Again, you have no fucking clue what Lisp is or what it does.)
3) If I write something in Pascal, my code has no dependence on C. You are too fucking stupid to understand this concept. Why do I even bother with your fucking willful ignorance, but here we go, for the benefit of others who don't have your mental impairments who might be interested.
There are Forth machines. There are Lisp machines. There are Oberon machines. There are assembly-based embedded machines. None of these have C in their toolchain. They are either bootstrapped from assembly languages or from their own non-C language. I can port the Pascal environment to it, and run my Pascal there. The Pascal defines the execution of my program in only Pascal terms. I can run it on a Pascal compiler/interpreter written in C, written in Assembly, written in Forth, or whatever. I don't care. Windows, Linux, and Mac are chasing after the Unix way, and have planted themselves on C. That is a purely arbitrary decision, and once you're one layer removed from that decision, C is 100% irrelevant. I can write a simple stack machine in any machine language, and high level language functionality is instantly bootstrapped and wide open to me.
The fact that C is somewhere buried in the chain, and generally
stays buried there once nicer programming constructs are built on top of it shows that it is a dying language existing only on its own momentum, not any sort of benefit.
Lisp has mature in-use webservers, text editors (duh), graphics/layout editors, not sure about sound editors but I know there are music programs, the Symbolics OS is getting an emulation based comeback with many inspired projects, and Lisp game jams are a thing. Lisp-style languages are growing in popularity, while C is declining. Besides, popularity is politics, money and inertia. Powerful & useful are generally not in the limelight, no matter the industry; the McDonald's products are what's most popular.
And it's not about "abstract bullshit" (another clue that you're fucking clueless about Lisp), it's about productivity, flexibility, and directness of expression. In C you always have to build up a ton of abstract bullshit infrastructure to make anything work, so you're eating bowls of dicks while calling everybody else homo, you clueless shit-spewing hypocrite.