Ick.

But not as far from reality as you may imagine. For those of you who've never seen the code to the original Bourne shell, S. R. Bourne had a bunch of macros defined like this:

#define BEGIN {
#define END }
#define IF if(
#define THEN ){
#define ELSE }else{
#define FI }
#define LOOP for(;;){
#define POOL }
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And so on. The code looked like a funky variant of Algol-68, or C written on heavy psychotropic drugs.

I once had to debug the code when we were porting it. The only way I could cope was to run it through the C-preprocessor and awk the result. (Why not run it through Perl, you ask? It didn't exist yet....)