To be fair, neither are C preprocessor macros. They're instead token substitutions. It's not that much better, but they're not literally text substitution. They

To be fair, neither are C preprocessor macros. They're instead token substitutions. It's not that much better, but they're not literally text substitution. They're at least more clever than just that. They're also of course surprisingly powerful, at the expense of being very cludgy.