Official C Challenge ①

Task:  Come up with an extension to the C programming language.  Provide a clear description of the extension, and a code sample that clearly shows what the extension is intended to do.

Prize:  (Winning criteria are not specified.)  The winner will have his extension featured in the C11 language standard.

My entry:  ... Sorry, I think C is perfect in every way already.

My entry:

Meta-C  (That name is probably already taken)

A built-in scripting language that runs, effectively, as a precompile step.  In otherwords


myfile.metac -> script parser -> myfile.c -> normal C compiler -> etc...

The scripting language might be Perl-like or Python-like, I don't know, but it just needs to be something modern with nice regular expression support.

The script delimiters are /@ and @/.

Example of what you could do:

myfile.metac

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int, char**)
{

  /@
    # (Assuming perl is the embedded language)
    my $n = 5;
    foreach my $i (1 .. $n)
    {
  @/
      printf("this line prints /@$n@/ times, this is time number /@$i@/\n");

  /@
    }
  @/

  return 0;
}

The script parser would expand that to

myfile.c

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int, char**)
{
      printf("this line prints 5 times, this is time number 1\n");

  return 0;
}

This is a pretty trivial example but the concept is very powerful.  You implement most of C++ manually in this way, since nearly everything C++ adds to C is just compile-time crap.  But the bonus would be that you would be in control of how things behave, instead of the C++ compiler.