[Haskell-cafe] looking for origin of quote on preprocessors and language design

[MightyByte]

It strikes me that this question may be related (perhaps distantly) to
Godel's incompleteness theorem.  Anyone else see similarities here?

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 7:32 AM, Johannes Waldmann
<waldmann at imn.htwk-leipzig.de> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> It's not exactly Haskell-specific, but ...
> I am trying to track down the origin of the proverb
>
> "the existence (or: need for) a preprocessor
> shows omissions in (the design of) a language."
>
>
> I like to think that in Haskell, we don't need
> preprocessors since we can manipulate programs
> programmatically, because they are data.
>
> In other words, a preprocessor realizes higher order
> functions, and you only need this if your base language
> is first-order.
>
> Yes, that's vastly simplified, and it does not cover
> all cases, what about generic programming
> (but this can be done via Data.Data)
> and alex/happy (but we have parsec) etc etc.
>
> Best regards, J.W.
>
>
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