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What is the point of #define in C++? I’ve only seen examples where it’s used in place of a “magic number” but I don’t see the point in just giving that value to a variable instead.
Mostly stylistic these days. When C was young, there was no such thing as a const variable. So if you used a variable instead of a
#define, you had no guarantee that somebody somewhere wouldn’t change the value of it, causing havoc throughout your program.In the old days, FORTRAN passed even constants to subroutines by reference, and it was possible (and headache inducing) to change the value of a constant like ‘2’ to be something different. One time, this happened in a program I was working on, and the only hint we had that something was wrong was we’d get an ABEND (abnormal end) when the program hit the
STOP 999that was supposed to end it normally.