Bournegol – Algol-like dialect of C used to write the original Bourne shell (opens in new tab)

I thought it was amusing until I read that:

    #define LOBYTE      0377
    #define STRIP       0177
    #define QUOTE       0200

I can deal with preprocessor abuse but octal crosses the line...

Also, in case anybody would have the bad idea to take inspiration from that code, don't do that:

    #define MAX(a,b)	((a)>(b)?(a):(b))

It evaluates the macro parameters twice.

Although, on second thought, don't do anything like that code anyway.

Wonder the rational for

  #define TRUE (-1)
  #define FALSE 0

instead of

  #define TRUE (1==1)
  #define FALSE !TRUE

edit: re-formatting

Reminds me of an intro to programming book in German that I once had, covering different styles from imperative to OO. Not even that old, late 90s I guess. But I guess the author just had to use C, even if he'd have preferred Pascal. So the very first thing the book does is introduce a boatload of preprocessor macros to make it look like Pascal. A weird way to start out if you had some prior C experience…

Then again, for short academic programs it probably won't cause that much confusion, having running code is more a side-effect of that, so it's a bit like executable pseudocode.

It does make me wonder what's the biggest program out there that's been written with heavy preprocessor abuse. Then again, not sure whether I'd really wanna know…

This is an interesting sort of forerunner to another topic in yesterday's HN [1], Cello [2], which appears to be essentially a more thorough, and better-grounded version of Bournegol.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8799070

[2] http://libcello.org/