I'm afraid it is not :) Template instantiation has way more rules than simple text replacement. Implicit instantiation is a story on its own, not counting that

I'm afraid it is not :) Template instantiation has way more rules than simple text replacement. Implicit instantiation is a story on its own, not counting that every compiler is free to implement own instantiation logic. Someone said once that the truly portable thing between C++ compilers is only preprocessor :)