i think this is the same reason why go is so conservative in many ways - it's just their style. see http://dreamsongs.com/WIB.html http://dreamsongs.com/WIB.ht

i think this is the same reason why go is so conservative in many ways - it's just their style. see http://dreamsongs.com/WIB.html http://dreamsongs.com/WIB.html which is the definitive reflection on why c is not lisp (if you're young enough to not already have seen it ;o) i don't know of a good preprocessor/template engine that does what you want (i had a similar need recently and came to the conclusion that there's a hole here - but i don't know m4 well enough to know what a replacement should look like). could you not use some language that compiles to c (gambit springs to mind) or switch to go (i haven't used go much, but from a little experience it strikes me as a very good "better c"). i guess another option is to look at the llvm toolchain. maybe you can hack their c front-end...?