While I love to hate on the preprocessor -- and did so publicly once in The Unix Hater's Handbook (p. 211) -- item 4 is silly. The whole point of many macros i

While I love to hate on the preprocessor -- and did so publicly once in The Unix Hater's Handbook (p. 211) -- item 4 is silly. The whole point of many macros is to circumvent referential transparency! This is true even in a language with real macros, like Lisp. ("Real macros" operate on a syntax tree representation, not on character strings.)