Sometimes it seems like the rules of programming are designed to make coding a chore. Here are 14 ways preprocessors can help make software development fun again.
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As much as we love them, programming languages can often feel like straitjackets. They’re a complex bundle of syntactic rules, and if we break them—even once—the compiler starts screaming out error messages. There are conventions to define every little thing, such as the best way to name variables or how to indent your code. The language designers claim these constraints are a feature, not a bug.
But programming languages don’t need to be that way. Over the years, clever developers have come up with sneaky and not so sneaky ways to write code in their own idiosyncratic styles. Preprocessors can bridge the gap, jumping into the pipeline before the code is compiled to fix all the strange twists and personal styles that keep …