[coreboot] need help with #define macro

ron minnich rminnich at gmail.com
Mon Dec 22 17:47:28 CET 2008


On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 11:45 AM, Joseph Smith <joe at settoplinux.org> wrote:
>
> Hello,
> I'm trying to setup a #define macro that can be used through out the
> program and also part of another macro. I know this won't work but you may
> get the idea of what I am trying to do:
>
> #define PARALLEL_PORT parport0
> #define PARPORT_BASE_FILE "/proc/sys/dev/parport/"PARALLEL_PORT"/base-addr"
> ...
> ...
> fd = open("/dev/PARALLEL_PORT",O_RDWR);
> ...
> printf(PARPORT_BASE_FILE\n);
> ...

you can do this kind of magic. I frown on it. Why? Because it is
1. not totally portable
2. saving time on a one-time operation which takes a trivial amount of time
3. over-emphasizing cpp magic, which is way overdone nowadays.
4. inflexible; why are you hard-coding a parallel port name at compile
time? What if you need to use a different one-- what do you do,
recompile the program?

An easy and portable and flexible way to do this:
char *partport = "parport0";
static char parportname[MAXPATHLEN];

sprintf(parportname, "/proc/sys/dev/parport/%s/base-addr", parport );

now add the code to set parport at runtime based on options.

In general, but especially for those things which can change, it's a
very bad idea to hard-code them in cpp magic.

Of course, this code is still very linux specific, but ...

thanks

ron




More information about the coreboot mailing list