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Comment by NAFV_P | Hacker News Reader

A few months ago I got fed up with losing track of what I had written in C. So I knocked up some python scripts to write templates for me, it displays the date and time the file was created and the filename in a comment. This concept can be taken much further.

CPP has been known to be abused by programmers as a general text processor, has anyone else started using another language to help them write C?

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C++ and Objective-C both began as preprocessors for C.

Wow, it's surprising what you can do with it.

Just to clarify a bit, C++ and Objective were not written in the C pre-processor, but rather implemented as their own pre-processor program, analogous to Qt's moc.

Yes like Cfront [1]. I used that back in the day, the pain of it caused me to rewrite all my C++ in C though :p Call me a coward!

[1] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cfront

> Just to clarify a bit, C++ and Objective were not written in the C pre-processor, but rather implemented as their own pre-processor program, analogous to Qt's moc.

I bet these pre-processor programs were themselves written in C.

You mean like $ SCCS %G% %M% %W% $ ?

Good times. I used to have emacs mode hooks that ensure that "$Id$" was written into files. I don't miss that.

In what I considered minor blasphemy one of my friends wrote git-hooks to keep using them.

Cheers, your comment has just fried my neurons.

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