Yes, indeed, I had a hard time explaining this but its what I mean.

I think you nailed this.

I don’t think that, but it could be. Variables, functions and things like loops, switches and if statements are things that many programming languages have in common. They can be specified without forcing a specific syntax and already take you far from turing machines.

I agree, I put an example in my main post, it isn’t really a language in that it has as little as possible language specifications. It could be simple or complex syntax based on what plugins you select for your use case. Its not a universal programming language more like a universal programming language specification that most languages fit into.

It is somewhat like running multiple linters and prettifiers but these are hefty tools, the build tool should provide an interface that lets you attach different programs for every little step from code to machine lang

LLVM Is something I want to check out for some time now but never did. yacc I haven’t heard about. but its indeed what I’m getting at, why haven’t we got a single language that you can adapt to all needs.

Yes, not sure what you mean by this but its indeed what I’m getting at, our compilers aren’t built enough in unix fashion to my liking. gcc handles preprocessing, compilation and linking. but I wouldn’t know how to run a second preprocessor after the first one in gcc, just did a quick search apparently gcc -E handles this, but that doesn’t seem that intuitive to run gcc -E on all files to some temporary directory, there run some other program on all the code then compile and link. A pipeline would be nicer and I also don’t know any tools that can do additional preprocessing.