Question

I have a bunch of printf debug helper macros and it would be pretty cool to have to not specify the type, is there anything you can do to allow something like macro overloading in c(can be gcc specific if its available in gcc 4.3). I thought maybe typeof but apparently that doesn’t work.

example macro(I also have some ascii terminal color stuff that I can’t remember of the top of my head)

#ifdef _DEBUG
#define DPRINT_INT(x) printf("int %s is equal to %i at line %i",#x,x,__LINE__);
.
.
.
#else
#define DPRINT_INT(x)
.
.
.
#endif

Answer 1

Try this; it uses gcc’s __builtin methods, and automatically determines the type for you, as best it can, and makes for an easy DEBUG macro where you don’t have to specify the type. Of course, you can compare typeof (x) to float, etc. etc.

#define DEBUG(x)                                                 \
  ({                                                             \
    if (__builtin_types_compatible_p (typeof (x), int))          \
        fprintf(stderr,"%d\n",x);                                \
    else if (__builtin_types_compatible_p (typeof (x), char))    \
        fprintf(stderr,"%c\n",x);                                \
    else if (__builtin_types_compatible_p (typeof (x), char[]))  \
        fprintf(stderr,"%s\n",x);                                \
    else                                                         \
        fprintf(stderr,"unknown type\n");                        \

  })