on Tue Feb 12 2008, "Tom Brinkman" <reportbase-AT-gmail.com> wrote:
With respect, I'm not sure there is *always* a better way than macros. For some applications macros provide a unique level of flexibility and efficiency. I'm the last person to advocate them, but when I constructed a logging library for our real-time scientific application, I was somewhat surprised to eventually figure out that logging macros *did* provide the best solution. So let's not discount John's effort on the grounds of anti-macro dogma alone, I'm sure we can find other problems ;).
I'm not discounting his efforts because of macros. What I am doing is pointing that they should be de-emphaisized and are not forced on me. If I dont care about the compile-time optimizations that a macro may provide, I should'nt be forced to use them.
Macros may provide some flexibility for some users, but others wont care about them and dont want to have to deal with them.
If the macro is doing something sufficiently interesting, you won't want to have to deal with the replacement. Some things just can't be captured with syntactic economy any other way. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting http://boost-consulting.com