Cloak VS cdecl

Where cloak.h is https://github.com/pfultz2/Cloak/blob/master/cloak.h

The above macros are admitttedly very hairy. If C had a better preprocessor, but was otherwise unchanged, they could look a lot nicer.

> I never said such a thing. Would appreciate if you didn't put words in my mouth.

A normal part of dialogue is, "I'm going to repeat your point back to you in my own words, and you can either agree with my restating of it, or point out at which point I've misunderstood you". That's what I was doing. "Would appreciate if you didn't put words in my mouth" is unnecessary hostility.

> In my concrete example, given that FILE and DIR were classified as objects, to which of the so-called objects does F(const char*, FILE, DIR) belong?

Take any language which you agree is "OO". Add one new feature (if it isn't already there): functions/methods which don't belong to any class/object. Now the function you are talking about is possible in that language. Did the language thereby suddenly cease to be OO when we added that feature? Most people would disagree with "Yes". But if "No", what is the actual difference between C and that language?

> I use this pattern so much I actually wrote a little metaprogramming language that is capable of generating a lot of the boilerplate for you. Link in my bio, if anyone's interested in looking at it.

Your language [0] is an interesting idea. I've done a lot of similar stuff (not at work, I'm very rarely asked to write C code professionally, but I like mucking around with it in my personal time). My own approach to C metaprogramming involves obtuse preprocessor hacks (e.g [1]) and shell scripts that use grep/awk/sed to find macro invocations and spit out new header files as a result. Maybe your way is better.

A word of warning though – do you realise your name for your language is an anti-gay slur in several dialects of English? You might end up unintentionally upsetting some people with it.

[0] https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

[1] https://github.com/pfultz2/Cloak/wiki/C-Preprocessor-tricks,...

Well, mostly I use idioms from the Cloak Wiki (https://github.com/pfultz2/Cloak/wiki/C-Preprocessor-tricks,...). It takes some time to realise them :)

For example, in a program like cdecl, if you get:

In the mean time, I still enjoy hacking on various projects such as cdecl and writing my programming blog. Aside from computers, I enjoy gardening, cooking, and hope to do some travel.

In case you’re wondering, these code snippets are from cdecl.

For a larger example, consider cdecl that is a program that can parse a C or C++ declaration (aka, “gibberish”) and explain it in English:

It’s been a while since I first started updating cdecl. From my previous article:

I decided to solve problem 6 myself by adding a feature to cdecl that allows you to #define macros as usual and then expand them where cdecl will print the expansion step-by-step as well as warn about things you might not expect. However, that’s a story for another time.

Additionally, you can use cdecl both to decipher and compose declarations.

Suppose there’s an API you’re using that allows “user data” to be given. In C, this is usually done by passing your data to a void* parameter, for example when visiting the nodes of a red-black tree. Assume we have a tree where the data we store at each node is:

There are many sites giving lots of bit twiddling expressions or functions in C, but none that I've found that give a concise set of bit testing functions, so here is a set I've written. (These are used as part of cdecl.)

I recently discovered a test-case that crashed cdecl: