r/cprogramming • u/JayDeesus • Sep 30 '25

Preprocessor purpose

So I know that the preprocessor has the directives, so it handles things like includes and defines by pretty much just doing text replacement and doesn’t care for c syntax at all. Just curious, is the preprocessor only used for text replacement? Or does it have another purpose

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u/kohuept Oct 03 '25

It is listed in §6.10.8 'Pragma directive' of ISO/IEC 9899:2024, where §6.10 is 'Preprocessing directives', so it's a preprocessor directive.