Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Those tools also offer more power than the C++ preprocessor, within the confines of a much more pleasant programming paradigm. (Well don't start an anti-sed war now though. :o)) A line must be drawn somewhere (after all we do use a makefile and not a little C++ program for builds don't we), and I would draw it someplace else than others. For example, if someone doesn't know awk, I'd suggest them to invest time in learning that instead of the boost preprocessor library.
FYI, Wave has a special #pragma usable for bridging this gap: #pragma wave system(any OS command) which spawns of the given command and intercepts the produced stdout stream, inserting it instead of the pragma itself :-P. In C99 mode you even may use it from the operator _Pragma and force a full macro expansion of the inserted results: #define EVAL(x) x EVAL(_Pragma("wave system(any OS command)")) Regards Hartmut