On Sat, Dec 22, 2007 at 05:25:26PM +0300, Miguel Mitrofanov wrote:
That's not C. That's the C preprocessor, which is a textual substitution macro language.
Well, the preprocessor is part of the language in a way. These two come together.
No. In fact, these are even two different programs, see man cpp.
No, in fact, preprocessing is an integral part of translating a C program, see the standard. The standard allows implementing the translation phases 1-6 (the so-called preprocessing phases) as a separate program, but there is no requirement to do that. It is true, however, that preprocessing used to be (in pre-standard days) separate from the language. This has not been true for decades. That said, this is all irrelevant to the question of whether C allows first-class functions. I'm sure we all are capable of writing Haskell programs that do not have simple and readable translations to C :) -- Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, Jyväskylä, Finland http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.fi/newblog/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/antti-juhani/