27 Sep
2005
27 Sep
'05
11:08 p.m.
Gunnar Dalsnes wrote:
Phillip Susi wrote:
Well, yes...
You can't step into macros in most debuggers (that I use.)
As Alex mentioned, it is a pain to try and sprinkle
debugging statements in a macro (if only because the
syntax is so ugly.)
Macros have ill defined side effects. This is especially
damaging to code maintainability when macros look like
functions.
Macros are bug prone because they have additional unique
issues over normal code, they are hard to read, and hard
to debug.
C++ (and some latter version of C if I'm not mistaken)
added inline functions for a reason: so programmers would
stop using macros.
Recently I was reading over some apache code and
they make extensive
use of macros for flow control. I found myself becoming frustrated to
no end because I could not figure out what the hell was going on.
They looked like nice, neat function calls, but I could not for the
life of me figure out where the code was that was being called.
So if they had been function calls and not macros it would have been
easier??? Or should we stop using functions also? ;-P If you cant find a macro (simple text search) you
probably wouldnt have
understod the code _without_ the macros either;-P
If I'm searching for something that looks like a function
call (especially if I'm searching for the definition not
the declaration), I might be looking in the wrong places
or searching using syntax that doesn't catch a #define.
Thanks,
Joseph