Question

in matlab:

tic
do something ...
toc

my attempt to have this functionality:

#define tic      double tic_t = clock();
#define toc      std::cout << (clock() - tic_t)/CLOCKS_PER_SEC \
                           << " seconds" << std::endl;

Now I can do this in C++:

tic
doSomething();
toc

The problem is that I cannot call it multiple times inside a function because tic_t will be defined several times.
I want to do something like this:

tic
doSomething1();
toc
tic
doSomething2();
toc

Answer 1

I’d implement it as a stack. Then, you can recurse, call it multiple times, do whatever you want, and it won’t break, so long as you call toc() after every tic(). As a bonus, you don’t have to resort to using macros:

#include <iostream>
#include <stack>
#include <ctime>

std::stack<clock_t> tictoc_stack;

void tic() {
    tictoc_stack.push(clock());
}

void toc() {
    std::cout << "Time elapsed: "
              << ((double)(clock() - tictoc_stack.top())) / CLOCKS_PER_SEC
              << std::endl;
    tictoc_stack.pop();
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
    tic();
    doSomething();
    toc();
    return 0;
}