From: Thomas Witt <witt@acm.org>
AFAICS the point this discussion revolves around is not whether somebody is wrong or right it's all about how we value these arguments in everyday life.
That sounds right.
While I think that on a technical basis Paul is right, I value automatic code indentation much higher than all the arguments in favour of not requiring the semicolon. Yes it is more pure but in my experience it causes way more trouble in practice then it does any good by educating programmers about the nature of macros. And yes it is sad to tailor your coding style to arguably insufficient tools but at the end of day there is no perfect tool and we need to get a job done in the best possible way given the circumstances.
As a sidenote I kind of doubt that making there usage looking syntactically diffferent from function calls will educate users about the way they work. To me doing away with the usual "macros are evil" attitude" sounds like a lot more promising approach to me.
I was thinking similarly. First, Paul contends you can fix code indenters, but how? Really, when an editor sees a line that has no statement ending token, it has to assume it continues the previous line. After all, whitespace can appear throughout C++ code. I see no way for an indenter to "Do the Right Thing(TM)" in this case. Second, adding or omitting a semicolon will *not* change a programmer's understanding of the preprocessor. I know many programmers who will simply add a semicolon or not as the compiler and indenter dicate. They won't give it any more thought than that. Thus, requiring that all macros be complete entities that *never* require semicolons is a purist position that offers only consistency, but at what cost? Code will be indented oddly, which can lead to misinterpretation, and habit will constantly interfere. -- Rob Stewart stewart@sig.com Software Engineer http://www.sig.com Susquehanna International Group, LLP using std::disclaimer;