Array format for #define (c preprocessor) asked 13 years, 1 month ago modified 4 years, 8 months ago viewed 97k times #ifndef headerfile_h #define headerfile_h and at the end of the file is #endif what is the purpose of this? Our solution was to use an environment variable with /d defines in it, combined with the additional options box in visual studio
In visual studio, add an environment variable macro, $(externalcompileroptions), to the additional options under project options → c/c++ → command line (remember both debug and release configurations) set the environment variable prior to calling msbuild I have been seeing code like this usually in the start of header files In c you can define constants like this #define number 9 so that wherever number appears in the program it is replaced with 9
#define _add_penguin(a) penguin ## a #define add_penguin(a) _add_penguin(a) #define width (100) #define height 200 add_penguin(height) // expands to penguin200 add_penguin(width) // error, cannot concatenate penguin and (100) same for stringization (#) Clearly this is a corner case and probably doesn't matter considering how width will presumably be used Still, it is something to keep in. The #define directive is a preprocessor directive
The preprocessor replaces those macros by their body before the compiler even sees it Think of it as an automatic search and replace of your source code A const variable declaration declares an actual variable in the language, which you can use.well, like a real variable Take its address, pass it around, use it, cast/convert it, etc
This can be done in gcc using the stringify operator #, but it requires two additional stages to be defined first #define xstr(x) str(x) #define str(x) #x the value of a macro can then be displayed with #pragma message the value of abc 3.4 stringification in the gcc online.
#ifdef debug #define debug_test 1 #else #define debug_test 0 #endif and then use debug_test where i used debug If you insist on a string literal for the format string (probably a good idea anyway), you can also introduce things like __file__, __line__ and __func__ into the output, which can improve the diagnostics: 2 #define is a preprocessor operation and will cause all occurrences of m to be replaced by 30000 before the compilation phase happens The other two examples are bona fide variables
As far as i know, what you're trying to do (use if statement and then return a value from a macro) isn't possible in iso c.but it is somewhat possible with statement expressions (gnu extension) I've found that this works on gcc and clang by default: