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Comment by _benj | Hacker News Reader

I was considering doing something like this just the other day. It had a gnuplot script and it seemed to me that it would be so much more versatile if I could use #ifdefine and #include in it.

I ended up using a Perl preprocessor, but it seems like cpp would work ok-ish for certain use cases that don’t require, say, strict tabs like Python among a few other things mentioned on the cpp manual.

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Check out https://github.com/logological/gpp it's what I use when I feel like I need a preprocessor. It's more flexible in syntax and operation than cpp.

I've used it in the past for wrangling the definitions of a multitude of SQL triggers I was using to generate a real-time materialized view. The fact that you can modify its syntax is very helpful for making it work with non-C syntaxes (like SQL or even LaTeX).

It even has an HTML mode built-in, which you can customize to your needs, but looks like:

    <#define x|y>
    <#macro arg|...>

which works better for certain WYSIWYG editors. You could modify the syntax to be

    <!--#define x y-->
    <!--#macro(arg, ...)-->

Thanks for sharing! Looks just like what I need :-)

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