I am new to iOS development and I just want to know the meaning of macro in Objective-C?
I have found that "macro" is used with #define but still do not get its meaning.
http://www.saturngod.net/ios-macro-define-value-with-condition
Yes, Larme is right. Macros can be used in many languages, it's not a specialty of objective-c language.
Macros are preprocessor definitions. What this means is that before your code is compiled, the preprocessor scans your code and, amongst other things, substitutes the definition of your macro wherever it sees the name of your macro. It doesn’t do anything more clever than that.
Almost literal code substitution. e.g.-
Suppose you want a method to return the maximum of two numbers. You write a macro to do this simple task:
#define MAX(x, y) x > y ? x : y
Simple, right? You then use the macro in your code like this:
int a = 1, b = 2;
int result = 3 + MAX(a, b);
EDIT:
The problem is that the preprocessor substitutes the macro definition into the code before compilation, so this is the code the compiler sees:
int a = 1, b = 2;
int result = 3 + a > b ? a : b;
C order of operations requires the sum 3 + a be calculated before the ternary operator is applied. You intended to save the value of 3 + 2 in result, but instead you add 3 + 1 first, and test if the sum is greater than 2, which it is. Thus result equals 2, rather than the 5 you expected.
So you fix the problem by adding some parentheses and try again:
#define MAX(x, y) ((x) > (y) ? (x) : (y))
A macro is a fragment of code which has been given a name. Whenever the name is used, it is replaced by the contents of the macro. There are two kinds of macros. They differ mostly in what they look like when they are used. Object-like macros resemble data objects when used, function-like macros resemble function calls.
An object-like macro is a simple identifier which will be replaced by a code fragment. It is called object-like because it looks like a data object in code that uses it. They are most commonly used to give symbolic names to numeric constants.
You create macros with the ‘#define’ directive. ‘#define’ is followed by the name of the macro and then the token sequence it should be an abbreviation for, which is variously referred to as the macro's body, expansion or replacement list. For example,
#define BUFFER_SIZE 1024
defines a macro named BUFFER_SIZE as an abbreviation for the token 1024. If somewhere after this ‘#define’ directive there comes a Objective C statement of the form
foo = (char *) malloc (BUFFER_SIZE);
The Objective C compiler will see the same tokens as it would if you had written
foo = (char *) malloc (1024);
You can also define macros whose use looks like a function call. These are called function-like macros. To define a function-like macro, you use the same ‘#define’ directive, but you put a pair of parentheses immediately after the macro name.
Like:
#define isIphone([[UIDevice currentDevice] userInterfaceIdiom] == UIUserInterfaceIdiomPhone)
#define GetImage(imageName) [UIImage imageWithContentsOfFile:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:imageName ofType:#"png"]]
Macros are compile time constants. That means they will replaced with actual values in the compile time.
#define MIN_VALUE 3 // Definition
if(x > MIN_VALUE) // Usage
{
}
While compiling it actually looks like
if(x > 3) // During compilation
{
}
Wikipedia has the answer, under Macro.
Definition:
The term originated with macro-assemblers, where the idea is to make available to the programmer a sequence of computing instructions as a single program statement, making the programming task less tedious and less error-prone.
Usage:
Keyboard and mouse macros that are created using an application's built-in macro features are sometimes called application macros. They are created by carrying out the sequence once and letting the application record the actions. An underlying macro programming language, most commonly a Scripting language, with direct access to the features of the application may also exist.
The idea is to setup several fixed CGPoint values with macros, and read them in code flexibly (randomly or with provided integer value)
I have a header file defining several CGPoints value like this:
#define kSpawnPoint1 {550,20}
#define kSpawnPoint2 {550,80}
#define kSpawnPoint3 {200,175}
I'm generating a random integer in my code between 1 to 3, and plan to read the CGPoint value in the macro according to the integer value. But don't know how to do it. After learning other tutorials about preprocessors, I write my code like following.
#define kSpawnPoint1 {550,20}
#define kSpawnPoint2 {550,80}
#define kSpawnPoint3 {200,175}
#define kSpawnPoint(x) kSpawnPoint##x
in the m file:
int tempInt = 1;
CGPoint tempSpawnPoint = kSpawnPoint(temInt);
However it doesn't work.(with warning: undeclared identifier 'kSpawnPointspawnPoint') How can I make this right? And is it the right way to pre-define several CGPoint? I think I must use the preprocessor to achieve this considering future multi-screen resolution support would be easier to implement in macro too, and my kSpawnPoints would not be the same with different screen resolution.
Macros only operate on text, not the values of variables. When you write kSpawnPoint(an_int), the preprocessor takes the literal string "an_int" and then pastes it, so you end up with kSpawnPointan_int. Thus, you would have to put a literal number as the argument in order to end up with one of your points: kSpawnPoint(1) -> kSpawnPoint1 -> {550, 20}
To choose randomly among your macros, you will have to put them into a structure that will exist at runtime, like an array or a switch statement.
There's a certain over-verbosity that I have to engage in when writing certain Boolean expressions, at least with all the languages I've used, and I was wondering if there were any languages that let you write more concisely?
The way it goes is like this:
I want to find out if I have a Thing that can be either A, B, C, or D.
And I'd like to see if Thing is an A or a B.
The logical way for me to express this is
//1: true if Thing is an A or a B
Thing == (A || B)
Yet all the languages I know expect it to be written as
//2: true if Thing is an A or a B
Thing == A || Thing == B
Are there any languages that support 1? It doesn't seem problematic to me, unless Thing is a Boolean.
Yes. Icon does.
As a simple example, here is how to get the sum of all numbers less than 1000 that are divisble by three or five (the first problem of Project Euler).
procedure main ()
local result
local n
result := 0
every n := 1 to 999 do
if n % (3 | 5) == 0 then
result +:= n
write (result)
end
Note the n % (3 | 5) == 0 expression. I'm a bit fuzzy on the precise semantics, but in Icon, the concept of booleans is not like other languages. Every expression is a generator and it may pass (generating a value) or fail. When used in an if expression, a generator will continue to iterate until it passes or exhausts itself. In this case, n % (3 | 5) == 0 is a generator which uses another generator (3 | 5) to test if n is divisible by 3 or 5. (To be entirely technical, this isn't even syntactic sugar.)
Likewise, in Python (which was influenced by Icon) you can use the in statement to test for equality on multiple elements. It's a little weaker than Icon though (as in, you could not translate the modulo comparison above directly). In your case, you would write Thing in (A, B), which translates exactly to what you want.
There are other ways to express that condition without trying to add any magic to the conditional operators.
In Ruby, for example:
$> thing = "A"
=> "A"
$> ["A","B"].include? thing
=> true
I know you are looking for answers that have the functionality built into the language, but here are two other means that I find work better as they solve more problems and have been in use for many decades.
Have you considered using a preprocessor?
Also languages like Lisp have macros which is part of the language.
This question already has answers here:
Closed 12 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Why do most programming languages only have binary equality comparison operators?
I have had a simple question for a fairly long time--since I started learning programming languages.
I'd like to write like "if x is either 1 or 2 => TRUE (otherwise FALSE)."
But when I write it in a programming language, say in C,
( x == 1 || x == 2 )
it really works but looks awkward and hard to read. I guess it should be possible to simplify such an or operation, and so if you have any idea, please tell me. Thanks, Nathan
Python allows test for membership in a sequence:
if x in (1, 2):
An extension version in C#
step 1: create an extension method
public static class ObjectExtensions
{
public static bool Either(this object value, params object[] array)
{
return array.Any(p => Equals(value, p));
}
}
step 2: use the extension method
if (x.Either(1,2,3,4,5,6))
{
}
else
{
}
While there are a number of quite interesting answers in this thread, I would like to point out that they may have performance implications if you're doing this kind of logic inside of a loop depending on the language. A far as for the computer to understand, the if (x == 1 || x == 2) is by far the easiest to understand and optimize when it's compiled into machine code.
When I started programming it seemed weird to me as well that instead of something like:
(1 < x < 10)
I had to write:
(1 < x && x < 10)
But this is how most programming languages work, and after a while you will get used to it.
So I believe it is perfectly fine to write
( x == 1 || x == 2 )
Writing it this way also has the advantage that other programmers will understand easily what you wrote. Using a function to encapsulate it might just make things more complicated because the other programmers would need to find that function and see what it does.
Only more recent programming languages like Python, Ruby etc. allow you to write it in a simpler, nicer way. That is mostly because these programming languages are designed to increase the programmers productivity, while the older programming languages' main goal was application performance and not so much programmer productivity.
It's Natural, but Language-Dependent
Your approach would indeed seem more natural but that really depends on the language you use for the implementation.
Rationale for the Mess
C being a systems programming language, and fairly close to the hardware (funny though, as we used to consider a "high-level" language, as opposed to writing machine code), it's not exactly expressive.
Modern higher-level languages (again, arguable, lisp is not that modern, historically speaking, but would allow you to do that nicely) allow you to do such things by using built-in constructs or library support (for instances, using Ranges, Tuples or equivalents in languages like Python, Ruby, Groovy, ML-languages, Haskell...).
Possible Solutions
Option 1
One option for you would be to implement a function or subroutine taking an array of values and checking them.
Here's a basic prototype, and I leave the implementation as an exercise to you:
/* returns non-zero value if check is in values */
int is_in(int check, int *values, int size);
However, as you will quickly see, this is very basic and not very flexible:
it works only on integers,
it works only to compare identical values.
Option 2
One step higher on the complexity ladder (in terms of languages), an alternative would be to use pre-processor macros in C (or C++) to achieve a similar behavior, but beware of side effects.
Other Options
A next step could be to pass a function pointer as an extra parameter to define the behavior at call-point, define several variants and aliases for this, and build yourself a small library of comparators.
The next step then would be to implement a similar thing in C++ using templates to do this on different types with a single implementation.
And then keep going from there to higher-level languages.
Pick the Right Language (or learn to let go!)
Typically, languages favoring functional programming will have built-in support for this sort of thing, for obvious reasons.
Or just learn to accept that some languages can do things that others cannot, and that depending on the job and environment, that's just the way it is. It mostly is syntactic sugar, and there's not much you can do. Also, some languages will address their shortcomings over time by updating their specifications, while others will just stall.
Maybe a library implements such a thing already and that I am not aware of.
that was a lot of interesting alternatives. I am surprised nobody mentioned switch...case - so here goes:
switch(x) {
case 1:
case 2:
// do your work
break;
default:
// the else part
}
it is more readable than having a
bunch of x == 1 || x == 2 || ...
more optimal than having a
array/set/list for doing a
membership check
I doubt I'd ever do this, but to answer your question, here's one way to achieve it in C# involving a little generic type inference and some abuse of operator overloading. You could write code like this:
if (x == Any.Of(1, 2)) {
Console.WriteLine("In the set.");
}
Where the Any class is defined as:
public static class Any {
public static Any2<T> Of<T>(T item1, T item2) {
return new Any2<T>(item1, item2);
}
public struct Any2<T> {
T item1;
T item2;
public Any2(T item1, T item2) {
this.item1 = item1;
this.item2 = item2;
}
public static bool operator ==(T item, Any2<T> set) {
return item.Equals(set.item1) || item.Equals(set.item2);
}
// Defining the operator== requires these three methods to be defined as well:
public static bool operator !=(T item, Any2<T> set) {
return !(item == set);
}
public override bool Equals(object obj) { throw new NotImplementedException(); }
public override int GetHashCode() { throw new NotImplementedException(); }
}
}
You could conceivably have a number of overloads of the Any.Of method to work with 3, 4, or even more arguments. Other operators could be provided as well, and a companion All class could do something very similar but with && in place of ||.
Looking at the disassembly, a fair bit of boxing happens because of the need to call Equals, so this ends up being slower than the obvious (x == 1) || (x == 2) construct. However, if you change all the <T>'s to int and replace the Equals with ==, you get something which appears to inline nicely to be about the same speed as (x == 1) || (x == 2).
Err, what's wrong with it? Oh well, if you really use it a lot and hate the looks do something like this in c#:
#region minimizethisandneveropen
public bool either(value,x,y){
return (value == x || value == y);
}
#endregion
and in places where you use it:
if(either(value,1,2))
//yaddayadda
Or something like that in another language :).
In php you can use
$ret = in_array($x, array(1, 2));
As far as I know, there is no built-in way of doing this in C. You could add your own inline function for scanning an array of ints for values equal to x....
Like so:
inline int contains(int[] set, int n, int x)
{
int i;
for(i=0; i<n; i++)
if(set[i] == x)
return 1;
return 0;
}
// To implement the check, you declare the set
int mySet[2] = {1,2};
// And evaluate like this:
contains(mySet,2,x) // returns non-zero if 'x' is contained in 'mySet'
In T-SQL
where x in (1,2)
In COBOL (it's been a long time since I've even glanced briefly at COBOL, so I may have a detail or two wrong here):
IF X EQUALS 1 OR 2
...
So the syntax is definitely possible. The question then boils down to "why is it not used more often?"
Well, the thing is, parsing expressions like that is a bit of a bitch. Not when standing alone like that, mind, but more when in compound expressions. The syntax starts to become opaque (from the compiler implementer's perspective) and the semantics downright hairy. IIRC, a lot of COBOL compilers will even warn you if you use syntax like that because of the potential problems.
In .Net you can use Linq:
int[] wanted = new int{1, 2};
// you can use Any to return true for the first item in the list that passes
bool result = wanted.Any( i => i == x );
// or use Contains
bool result = wanted.Contains( x );
Although personally I think the basic || is simple enough:
bool result = ( x == 1 || x == 2 );
Thanks Ignacio! I translate it into Ruby:
[ 1, 2 ].include?( x )
and it also works, but I'm not sure whether it'd look clear & normal. If you know about Ruby, please advise. Also if anybody knows how to write this in C, please tell me. Thanks. -Nathan
Perl 5 with Perl6::Junction:
use Perl6::Junction 'any';
say 'yes' if 2 == any(qw/1 2 3/);
Perl 6:
say 'yes' if 2 == 1|2|3;
This version is so readable and concise I’d use it instead of the || operator.
Pascal has a (limited) notion of sets, so you could do:
if x in [1, 2] then
(haven't touched a Pascal compiler in decades so the syntax may be off)
A try with only one non-bitwise boolean operator (not advised, not tested):
if( (x&3) ^ x ^ ((x>>1)&1) ^ (x&1) ^ 1 == 0 )
The (x&3) ^ x part should be equal to 0, this ensures that x is between 0 and 3. Other operands will only have the last bit set.
The ((x>>1)&1) ^ (x&1) ^ 1 part ensures last and second to last bits are different. This will apply to 1 and 2, but not 0 and 3.
You say the notation (x==1 || x==2) is "awkward and hard to read". I beg to differ. It's different than natural language, but is very clear and easy to understand. You just need to think like a computer.
Also, the notations mentioned in this thread like x in (1,2) are semantically different then what you are really asking, they ask if x is member of the set (1,2), which is not what you are asking. What you are asking is if x equals to 1 or to 2 which is logically (and semantically) equivalent to if x equals to 1 or x equals to 2 which translates to (x==1 || x==2).
In java:
List list = Arrays.asList(new Integer[]{1,2});
Set set = new HashSet(list);
set.contains(1)
I have a macro that I use a lot that's somewhat close to what you want.
#define ISBETWEEN(Var, Low, High) ((Var) >= (Low) && (Var) <= (High))
ISBETWEEN(x, 1, 2) will return true if x is 1 or 2.
Neither C, C++, VB.net, C#.net, nor any other such language I know of has an efficient way to test for something being one of several choices. Although (x==1 || x==2) is often the most natural way to code such a construct, that approach sometimes requires the creation of an extra temporary variable:
tempvar = somefunction(); // tempvar only needed for 'if' test:
if (tempvar == 1 || tempvar == 2)
...
Certainly an optimizer should be able to effectively get rid of the temporary variable (shove it in a register for the brief time it's used) but I still think that code is ugly. Further, on some embedded processors, the most compact and possibly fastest way to write (x == const1 || x==const2 || x==const3) is:
movf _x,w ; Load variable X into accumulator
xorlw const1 ; XOR with const1
btfss STATUS,ZERO ; Skip next instruction if zero
xorlw const1 ^ const2 ; XOR with (const1 ^ const2)
btfss STATUS,ZERO ; Skip next instruction if zero
xorlw const2 ^ const3 ; XOR with (const2 ^ const3)
btfss STATUS,ZERO ; Skip next instruction if zero
goto NOPE
That approach require two more instructions for each constant; all instructions will execute. Early-exit tests will save time if the branch is taken, and waste time otherwise. Coding using a literal interpretation of the separate comparisons would require four instructions for each constant.
If a language had an "if variable is one of several constants" construct, I would expect a compiler to use the above code pattern. Too bad no such construct exists in common languages.
(note: Pascal does have such a construct, but run-time implementations are often very wasteful of both time and code space).
return x === 1 || x === 2 in javascript
I want to check whether a value is equal to 1. Is there any difference in the following lines of code
Evaluated value == 1
1 == evaluated value
in terms of the compiler execution
In most languages it's the same thing.
People often do 1 == evaluated value because 1 is not an lvalue. Meaning that you can't accidentally do an assignment.
Example:
if(x = 6)//bug, but no compiling error
{
}
Instead you could force a compiling error instead of a bug:
if(6 = x)//compiling error
{
}
Now if x is not of int type, and you're using something like C++, then the user could have created an operator==(int) override which takes this question to a new meaning. The 6 == x wouldn't compile in that case but the x == 6 would.
It depends on the programming language.
In Ruby, Smalltalk, Self, Newspeak, Ioke and many other single-dispatch object-oriented programming languages, a == b is actually a message send. In Ruby, for example, it is equivalent to a.==(b). What this means, is that when you write a == b, then the method == in the class of a is executed, but when you write b == a, then the method in the class of b is executed. So, it's obviously not the same thing:
class A; def ==(other) false end; end
class B; def ==(other) true end; end
a, b = A.new, B.new
p a == b # => false
p b == a # => true
No, but the latter syntax will give you a compiler error if you accidentally type
if (1 = evaluatedValue)
Note that today any decent compiler will warn you if you write
if (evaluatedValue = 1)
so it is mostly relevant for historical reasons.
Depends on the language.
In Prolog or Erlang, == is written = and is a unification rather than an assignment (you're asserting that the values are equal, rather then testing that they are equal or forcing them to be equal), so you can use it for an assertion if the left hand side is a constant, as explained here.
So X = 3 would unify the variable X and the value 3, whereas 3 = X would attempt to unify the constant 3 with the current value of X, and be equivalent of assert(x==3) in imperative languages.
It's the same thing
In general, it hardly matters whether you use,
Evaluated value == 1 OR 1 == evaluated value.
Use whichever appears more readable to you. I prefer if(Evaluated value == 1) because it looks more readable to me.
And again, I'd like to quote a well known scenario of string comparison in java.
Consider a String str which you have to compare with say another string "SomeString".
str = getValueFromSomeRoutine();
Now at runtime, you are not sure if str would be NULL. So to avoid exception you'll write
if(str!=NULL)
{
if(str.equals("SomeString")
{
//do stuff
}
}
to avoid the outer null check you could just write
if ("SomeString".equals(str))
{
//do stuff
}
Though this is less readable which again depends on the context, this saves you an extra if.
For this and similar questions can I suggest you find out for yourself by writing a little code, running it through your compiler and viewing the emitted asembler output.
For example, for the GNU compilers, you do this with the -S flag. For the VS compilers, the most convenient route is to run your test program in the debugger and then use the assembeler debugger view.
Sometimes in C++ they do different things, if the evaluated value is a user type and operator== is defined. Badly.
But that's very rarely the reason anyone would choose one way around over the other: if operator== is not commutative/symmetric, including if the type of the value has a conversion from int, then you have A Problem that probably wants fixing rather than working around. Brian R. Bondy's answer, and others, are probably on the mark for why anyone worries about it in practice.
But the fact remains that even if operator== is commutative, the compiler might not do exactly the same thing in each case. It will (by definition) return the same result, but it might do things in a slightly different order, or whatever.
if value == 1
if 1 == value
Is exactly the same, but if you accidentally do
if value = 1
if 1 = value
The first one will work while the 2nd one will produce an error.
They are the same. Some people prefer putting the 1 first, to void accidentally falling into the trap of typing
evaluated value = 1
which could be painful if the value on the left hand side is assignable. This is a common "defensive" pattern in C, for instance.
In C languages it's common to put the constant or magic number first so that if you forget one of the "=" of the equality check (==) then the compiler won't interpret this as an assignment.
In java, you cannot do an assignment within a boolean expression, and so for Java, it is irrelevant which order the equality operands are written in; The compiler should flag an error anyway.