Interesting project!

My reflex is to suggest that you consider restructuring this as a 
rules-driven process, using XSLT (which is, after all, a rules-based 
nonprocedural language, and can do more intelligent processing than the 
simple C preprocessor you've been playing with).

(There's definitely something to be said for writing your "library 
functions" in a higher-level language that's explicitly designed for 
manipulating XML rather than trying to do it at a lower level. And 
applying inflection does sound very much like a styling problem, even if 
it's in the temporal rather than spatial rendering domain.)

Caveat: Depending on exactly how your data is structured and what kinds 
of rules you're tyring to apply, XSLT may or may not be a reasonable 
approach. I freely admit that I'm biased because I've been working on 
XSLT processors for the past five years, and I do recognize that this 
general-purpose tool isn't a good fit for all tasks. But this sounds 
like a case where it might be entirely appropriate.

-- 
() ASCII Ribbon Campaign  | Joe Kesselman
/\ Stamp out HTML e-mail! | System architexture and kinetic poetry


-- 
() ASCII Ribbon Campaign  | Joe Kesselman
/\ Stamp out HTML e-mail! | System architexture and kinetic poetry