Dear MS boffins:
Hypothetically speaking, how feasible do you think it would be for future versions of .net languages to have something equivalent to pre-processor macros, the likes of which are seen in C/C++?
I make extremely heavy use of them in my non-dotnet projects and my only real criticism of C#/VB is that they lack such a powerful coding aid, (otherwise it's terriffic).
I think VB and C# are similar enough to C++ now to permit such a feature, so why not?
Some reasons I thought about for not having them are as follows:
- Marketing reasons, maybe it would bring VB/C# too close to C++ to be of any benefit.
- it would screw up or slow down intellisense too much.
- Only a weirdowould want such a thing.
If it would be impractical to build it into the languages as standard, would it be something that could be implemented as an IDE plugin by a third party developer? Would the IDE bindings as they stand permit such an invasive code maniplation tool?
Discuss
