Many years ago a friend of mine had a hobby project to try to implement BASIC using the C preprocessor. The idea, which seemed rather cockamamie at the time, wa

Many years ago a friend of mine had a hobby project to try to implement BASIC using the C preprocessor. The idea, which seemed rather cockamamie at the time, was to come up with something you could feed a BASIC program to and have it come out as a compiled executable. Nowadays, that kind of idea is everywhere, of course. I don't know if he ever got it finished (or indeed, if it's even possible in a practical sense. The C preprocessor is Turing-complete (edit: more or less, if you're allowed unlimited runs), so it's obviously theoretically possible).