Gosh! adapting the C++ preprocessor is too big a gun for such a small sparrow :-). I just wanted to make my header files report themselves to some kind of static metainformation manager. But still thank you for pointing out this alternative!

Yes, I’ve resorted to template specialization and killed two birds with one stone, namely implemented both a meaningful global static assertion mechanism (by using the ‘sizeof’ operator on an undefined specialized template class) AND my beloved recursion to solve the above-mentioned challenge. With a little bit of boilerplate code pasted into each header, I’ve achieved reasonably good results.

I knew of the Boost library before but haven’t managed to find a proper library that would do what I needed.

Thanks for your brilliant and compendious answer and cheers!
Mykhailo

If templates won’t solve your problem and you need the preprocessor to get down to the tokens, take a look at the Boost Preprocessor library. It let’s you simulate recursion pretty well. I’ve written about it here.

Or as a last resort you could write your own preprocessor. It’s not as hard as it sounds because you just have to modify an open-source (embeddable) preprocessor/tokenizer. Sounds easy, eh ;-). See Wave, which is based on Spirit.

Let me know if any of this works out, of if you find something else interesting.