No offence but you're not recognising that things were very, very different. C was designed as a language for small sytems. It's used for ridiculously large an

No offence but you're not recognising that things were very, very different. C was designed as a language for small sytems. It's used for ridiculously large and inapprpriate thinga now. The #include is terrible but it was ok back then - things were small enough to hold in your head. No longer. Compilers were simpler back when C was designed. IIRC PDPs often had just a few K of memory. A megabyte would be huge in the 80's. A textual preprocessor can be done in a couple of K I'd guess, or less. Also a preprocessor is useful for many other things unrelated to the C language. I understand your frustration but things started that way for a good reason, please don't criticise unless you really understand that. Feel free to criticise the inertia that means we have much the same stuff nearly half a century later (but also understand why).