According to the dragon book, one of the first steps the source code of a program goes through during compilation is the Preprocessor.Assuming a language like C++ where there is no underlying virtual machine to abstract away the underlying platform, is there a way to deal with cross platform compilation without requiring the use of the Preprocessor?Another use case would be code to remove code that should only be executed in Debug Builds.P.S: I'm not mentioning other uses of the preprocessor like defining a value for PI as these can easily be replaced with the use const global variables.
Is it possible to design a C++ like language without a Preprocessor?
programming languages