The lack of (easy) recursion in CPP is so frustrating because it was always available in assembly languages with even very old and very simple macro assemblers- with the caveat that the recursion depth was often very limited, and no tail call elimination. For example, if you need to fill memory:

    ; Fill memory with backward sequence
    macro fill n
        word n
        if n != 0
            fill n - 1
        endif
    endm

    So "fill 3" expands to:
        word 3
        word 2
        word 1
        word 0

There is no way this was not known about when C was created. They must have been burned by recursive macro abuse and banned it (perhaps from m4 experience as others have said).

The other assembly language feature that I missed is the ability to switch sections. This is useful for building tables in a distributed fashion. Luckily you can do it with gcc.