If the actual question was "why wasn't C...?", the whole point of C was to achieve the maximum amount of power with a minimal language system. Making a preproce

If the actual question was "why wasn't C...?", the whole point of C was to achieve the maximum amount of power with a minimal language system. Making a preprocessor that is powerful enough to handle lexical and syntactic analysis of source code was not necessary for that goal. If you really want it, use sed (and don't forget M4). Also, IIRC, programming languages with mutable syntax were generally acknowledged to be a bad idea around the time C was being born. Something about every program being written in a different language :-)