Funny C Rules (And Low-Level Languages in general)

[Baker]

[jitspoe]

The "string" "combination" stuff is super useful:

A lame example, but:

#define GAME_NAME "MyTestGame"

const char *welcome_string = "Hello, and welcome to " GAME_NAME "! Enjoy your stay!"

If you have a string like this that frequently changes and is used all over (ex version/build ID), it can be a real time saver.

[Baker]

I find the lack of preprocessor capabilities to do some light string manipulation a limitation, personally. To anything other than very light string concatenation is non-existent. With the stringify macro operators you can do some fairly interesting things, but the preprocessor directives required to pull it off end up being rather difficult to read

[mankrip]

I used the second one for all quit messages, as in "Blahblah.\n\n\
Blah?". They became much easier to read in the code.

I didn't know about the sizeof one. Nice find!

[Baker]

[jitspoe]

[Baker]

[mh]

[Baker]

That's crazy!

[Baker]

[Baker]

[mh]

Assignment in any sane world should always go right-to-left. The C assignment operator, strcpy, memcpy - all go right-to-left. Quake's VectorCopy (and other Vector* macros) have tripped me up more than once.

[Baker]

[Baker]

[ericw]

Yeah the
dest->foo = src->foo;
VectorCopy(src->pos, dest->pos);
thing is awful. Using "const" liberally could detect mixing up the order of VectorCopy, but usually in Quake both source and dest are mutable.

IMO the 0=success, 1=failure, or -1=less, 0=same, 1=greater stuff is horrible legacy style, but often you have to have no choice because you're using API's that use that. The right way is C++11's "enum class" which don't implicitly convert to int.