Posts Tagged ‘macro’

Variable length C macros

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

Something that came up in porting X2 and X3 is that Visual Studio in Windows handles variable length macros, and as far as we could see, GCC didnt.

This means that in gcc, if you wanted to create a define that would do a job and report where it was called from, you would need to do something like:

void mydebug(const char *file,int line,const char *fmt,...)

#define DEBUGOUT1(x) mydebug(__FILE__,__LINE__,x)
#define DEBUGOUT2(x,y) mydebug(__FILE__,__LINE__,x,y)
#define DEBUGOUT3(x,y,z) mydebug(__FILE__,__LINE__,x,y,z)

and so on…

However, there is a solution which does the job, which we found after a fair amount of investigation. The recommended method would be

#define DEBUGOUT(x,y...) mydebug(__FILE__,__LINE__,x,y)

Which will work, but only if you actually add a second parameter to the DEBUGOUT call. Without, it will expand

DEBUGOUT(x)

to

mydebug(__FILE__,__LINE__,x,)

which will obviously fail to compile. To fix this, simply bear in mind that … in the macro just means everything else, so you can do

#define DEBUGOUT(x...) mydebug(__FILE__,__LINE__,x)

which then works with single and multiple values in macros, x becomes the fmt AND the … for the mydebug .

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