General purpose macros

[WhiteCube]

I'm trying to design a macro preprocessor that will work with any language.

To make parsing simple, all it needs is one character that is never used by the destination source code. It uses this as an escape character.

Unfortunately, this approach looks a bit hard to read.

For example, escape char ~ with macro definition
~{test~;~1,~0 and ~0~}
and macro call
~[test~(zip~,zap~)~]
produces the line
zap,zip and zip

~{ begin definitiom
~; seperate name from text
~} end definition
~0 argument
~1 argument
...
~9 argument
~[ begin call
~( begin arguments
~, arguments delimiter
~) end arguments
~] end call

I don't see any other way that will work with every language.

 

[WhiteCube]

This turned out to be a really bad idea.

The source code with macros in it looked awful.

I was trying to make it easier to work with esolangs, but the macros hide the esolang and I end up with an incredibly slow, poorly designed, high-level language.