Question

I was looking through the DXUTCore project that comes with the DirectX March 2009 SDK, and noticed that instead of making normal accessor methods, they used macros to create the generic accessors, similar to the following:

#define GET_ACCESSOR( x, y )  inline x Get##y()  { DXUTLock l; return m_state.m_##y;};
...

GET_ACCESSOR( WCHAR*, WindowTitle );

It seems that the ## operator just inserts the text from the second argument into the macro to create a function operating on a variable using that text. Is this something that is standard in C++ (i.e. not Microsoft specific)? Is its use considered good practice? And, what is that operator called?

Answer 1

Token-pasting operator, used by the pre-processor to join two tokens into a single token.