I am new to Firebird and am trying to determine if it can meet my
needs.

Please forgive me if this is a stupid question; I've been looking
through
the documentation and can not find anything about this.

I want to write a C application that can communicate with the embedded
version of the Firebird server, but I would like to avoid having to
use the special pre-processor that seems to be required in the sample
files provided. Is there a way to make database calls directly from
C or C++? If so, is there some setup I need to do (like establishing
an ODBC data source or something)?

I am hoping for a situation similar to SQLITE, where you just make
SQL calls against a database file without a database server that
requires a separate installation.

Is there a place I can find an example of this?

Thank you.