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The C# preprocessor is unnecessarily restricted. It has a few features but it feels very arbitrary what they include or exclude. I think they didn’t like the idea but couldn’t avoid it totally so they did something half assed. I bet a lot of frameworks that need reflection could be replaced with macros if the preprocessor had a few more features.

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It is not half assed, rather what has been proven since the 60's to work properly in all languages that aren't C, nor copy-paste compatible with C.

Even C++ is reducing the need to keep using the pre-processor with each ISO revision, in an ideal modern C++ world without C legacy baggage, the pre-processor will be so half assed like in C#. C++20 is already almost there.

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