October 2004
Intermediate to advanced
240 pages
6h 22m
English
book
C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices
by Herb Sutter, Andrei Alexandrescu
Content preview from C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices
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16. Avoid macros
Summary
TO_PUT_IT_BLUNTLY: Macros are the bluntest instrument of C and C++’s abstraction facilities, ravenous wolves in functions’ clothing, hard to tame, marching to their own beat all over your scopes. Avoid them.
Discussion
It’s hard to find language that’s colorful enough to describe macros, but we’ll try. To quote from [Sutter04] §31:
Macros are obnoxious, smelly, sheet-hogging bedfellows for several reasons, most of which are related to the fact that they are a glorified text-substitution facility whose effects are applied during preprocessing, before any C++ syntax and semantic rules can even begin to apply.
Lest there remain any ambiguity on this point, we note also that Bjarne Stroustrup has written:
I dislike most ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.