[fpc-pascal] Proper preprocessor?

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Ryan Joseph said:
> > complicating it even more. The consequences of such a step are far-reaching.
> > 
> > And till now, no-one has presented the really pressing use cases that would warrant such a step.
> 
> How can you integrate a preprocessor without misaligning error messages
> and debugging information?

Have the preprocessor generate some form of lineinfo that your IDE can mine?

> I put this into the category of dogma because we?re being asked to provide
> ?valid?  use cases instead of trusting that we have know what?s best for
> our own code.

Then trust us that we know our business with respect to the compiler
internals.

>  It?s not possible to know in advance what people may need
> so providing them good tools as a fail safe is only sensible.

Good and "fail" are horribly subjective here.
 
> My own case I had just know was hard coded some vertex data from a C
> program and if I had a good macro syntax I could have finished it much
> quicker and it would have looked nicer.  It doesn?t matter if this was
> ?best practice?  or not.  I just wanted to finish it so I could move on to
> more important things.

Which is an argument that can be made for every external language feature.
Not really convincing.