you should be writing everything in macros, as macros are fast

#define THE_PROGRAM all \
    your \
    code \
    goes \
    here

int main()
{
    THE_PROGRAM();
}

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OK so this is kind of a pain in the neck to do a lot of times but sometimes you can get the output if the C preprocessor.

Then through careful editing, you can kind of figure out what it's turning in to.

int main(...) {
   WEIRD_MACRO(1, 2);
}

Then you could just put comments above and below it, and run cpp -I/all/include/directories main.c

It will tell you the final output and also have debugging garbage about where each thing expanded from.

Not ideal, and also in a big project that uses a complex build tool it can be incredibly hard to get the cpp args, but it can help.

The DRY principle says that if you write something more than once you should refactor it. Here I see you used () in two places; that can be a macro, to ease readability.

thanks for the helpful comments everybody. i'm writing Elixir instead of C in this case, but that just goes to show that you can have this problem in any language with macros. i remember feeling this way about some lisp code in the past, too.