A preprocessor is a program that takes text and does lexical conversions to it. The type of lexical conversions may include substitution of macros, conditional inclusion, and inclusion of other files.
The C programming language has a preprocessor that performs the following transformations:
- Replaces trigraphs with equivalents.
- Concatenates source lines.
- Replaces comments with white space.
- Reacts to lines starting with an octothorp (#), performing macro substituion, file inclusion, conditional inclusion, and other transformations.
Overuse of the C preprocessor is considered bad style, especially in C++. Stroustrup introduced features such as templates into C++ in an attempt to make the C preprocessor irrelevant; however, his file inclusion alternative was never seriously considered as it was a poor imitation of the C preprocessor's file inclusion mechanism.
Other famous preprocessors include m4 and Oracle Pro*C. The m4 preprocessor is general-purpose; Oracle Pro*C converts embedded PL/SQL into C.
Preprocessing can be quite a cumbersome in incremental parsing[?] or incremental lexial analysis[?] because changes on definition of rules of preprocessing can affect the entire text to be preprocessed.
Typical example seen in hello program[?] in C is
#include<stdio.h>
int
main ()
{
printf ("hello mundo\n");
}
In this case, #include is treated by preprocessor to include a file called stdio.h lexically.
