Author here. Happy to take any feedback or questions about this post.
quuxplusone · 7m ago
At one point you say "precompiler" when I guess you mean "preprocessor"?
Also I think the C preprocessor would be relatively unhelpful with the file format you explained in the post: As soon as you reached the first unmatched, unquoted apostrophe, cpp would assume it was inside a really long character literal and refuse to substitute any macros until the next apostrophe.
cpp is great, but it does basically require a grammar that assigns broadly the expected meaning to ' " # // /* */. Curly-brace languages fine, running English text not so much.
Also I think the C preprocessor would be relatively unhelpful with the file format you explained in the post: As soon as you reached the first unmatched, unquoted apostrophe, cpp would assume it was inside a really long character literal and refuse to substitute any macros until the next apostrophe.
cpp is great, but it does basically require a grammar that assigns broadly the expected meaning to ' " # // /* */. Curly-brace languages fine, running English text not so much.