This reminds me of Turbo Pascal, where certain runtime functions can take variable arguments, yet the language does not allow defining such. It felt like magic.

This reminds me of Turbo Pascal, where certain runtime functions can take variable arguments, yet the language does not allow defining such. It felt like magic. Abother example is lisp, and yes lisp has the ultimate macro language (scheme, cl, clojure), and yet in Common Lisp there is the notion of "open coded" - certain builtin names are known to the compuler/interpreter and can do also magical things. That to be said certain implementations of C/C++ also have them.