Please check with array initialized from file or other dynamic source. With maximal inlining, there's a risk of constant propagation resulting in a lot of computation happening at compile time rather than run time.
As an anecdote of just how powerful this can be, I once wrote a prototype of a simulation (written in C) that used a lot of integer divisions and needed to be run many times with different parameters. As a quick and dirty hack that took about half hour to implement, I decided to just have the program as a template string and the parameters be substituted in by a python script that called GCC. To the amazement of a ve…
Next time you're considering something like this, have a look at D: It has nearly the same syntax as C but with some seriously awesome power features. You could've easily written the whole python/c mess entirely in D, generating the code to compile at compile time e.g. from a config file.