DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF PRECPP: A PREPROCESSOR FOR A SUBSET OF C++

Abstract

A preprocessor for a subset of object oriented language C++ has been designed and implemented in C language. The designed preprocessor has facility to preprocess the class construct, friend function, and operator overloading definition in C++ and to provide an intermediate form in C language. Operator overloading has been done only for arithmetic operators. Since C++ is a superset of C most of the constructs of C++ are similar to that of C, only program control statements, If then else, while loop, case statement, for loop, which may use C++ construct, are syntactically checked by the preprocessor while the other constructs are checked by the C compiler at the time of compiling and running the intermediate form. An error handling routine has been included to give proper error messages, in case of any error in source program, to help the user in debugging his program