[badsectoracula]

It it technically possible in that C macros are supposedly Turing complete, but i mean i want something like being able to add a value to a variable, iterate through values (proper list would be neat but i'd be ok with a string of space separate values), etc.

[camel-cdr]

> It it technically possible in that C macros are supposedly Turing complete

It isn't Turing complete, because it will always terminate, but you can make the execution time (number of execution steps) arbitrary large exponential in respect to the number of source lines.

There are a few libraries that implement that.

https://github.com/rofl0r/chaos-pp: Quite high level implementation, that supports arbitrary precision decimal base arithmetic.

https://github.com/camel-cdr/boline: Mine implements 8/16/32/64 bit arithmetic, and low level control flow.

You can very often get away with using unary numbers and/or constant expressions to work around the limitations without needing a library.

Got any problem in mind? I've got some time on my hands to problem solve.

[badsectoracula]

> It isn't Turing complete, because it will always terminate

Well, i wrote "supposedly" because i didn't try it myself but found a post[0] that claims it is. The example is even about making loops.

But the point is that these aren't only way too hacky but also slow down compilation. I did use some of my own preprocessor hacks when i wanted to do some fancy stuff with it at the past to implement an RTTI system that allowed automatic serialization of structs with nesting and references and while it worked (x-macros FTW), it was cumbersome and slowed down compilation so much that at the end i found it both much simpler and faster (in compilation time) to replace a ton of preprocessor macros with a code generator and a couple of #includes that included the generated code.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3136686/is-the-c99-prepr...