This goes back even further, Randall is referencing the ps3 security, that has a constant instead of a random number. That allowed failOverflow to remove one variable and reverse the private key to sign ps3 apps.

Make enough C macro definitions and you can certainly do that, I did my final project in my high school programming class in the 90’s like that, made macros to simulate QBasic syntax and then just wrote it in basic, the end result is the macros converted everything into valid C++ and it compiled fine. Fortunately my teacher for that class was cool, and he was amused by it and since it compiled with no warnings and did what it was supposed to do, I got full marks for it.