#undef-ing in Practice?

Question

I'm wondering about the practical use of #undef in C. I'm working through K&R, and am up to the preprocessor. Most of this was material I (more or less) understood, but something on page 90 (second edition) stuck out at me:

Names may be undefined with #undef, usually to ensure that a routine is really a function, not a macro:

#undef getchar

int getchar(void) { ... }

Is this a common practice to defend against someone #define-ing a macro with the same name as your function? Or is this really more of a sample that wouldn't occur in reality? (EG, no one in his right, wrong nor insane mind should be rewriting getchar(), so it shouldn't come up.) With your own function names, do you feel the need to do this? Does that change if you're developing a library for others to use?

Answer 1

What it does

If you read Plauger's The Standard C Library (1992), you will see that the <stdio.h> header is allowed to provide getchar() and getc() as function-like macros (with special permission for getc() to evaluate its file pointer argument more than once!). However, even if it provides macros, the implementation is also obliged to provid actual functions that do the same job, primarily so that you can access a function pointer called getchar() or getc() and pass that to other functions.

That is, by doing:

#include <stdio.h>
#undef getchar

extern int some_function(int (*)(void));

int core_function(void)
{
   int c = some_function(getchar);
   return(c);
}

As written, the core_function() is pretty meaningless, but it illustrates the point. You can do the same thing with the isxxxx() macros in <ctype.h> too, for example.

Normally, you don't want to do that - you don't normally want to remove the macro definition. But, when you need the real function, you can get hold of it. People who provide libraries can emulate the functionality of the standard C library to good effect.

Seldom needed

Also note that one of the reasons you seldom need to use the explicit #undef is because you can invoke the function instead of the macro by writing:

int c = (getchar)();

Because the token after getchar is not an (, it is not an invocation of the function-like macro, so it must be a reference to the function. Similarly, the first example above, would compile and run correctly even without the #undef.

If you implement your own function with a macro override, you can use this to good effect, though it might be slightly confusing unless explained.

/* function.h */
…
extern int function(int c);
extern int other_function(int c, FILE *fp);
#define function(c) other_function(c, stdout);
…

/* function.c */

…

/* Provide function despite macro override */
int (function)(int c)
{
    return function(c, stdout);
}

The function definition line doesn't invoke the macro because the token after function is not (. The return line does invoke the macro.

Answer 2

Macros are often used to generate bulk of code. It's often a pretty localized usage and it's safe to #undef any helper macros at the end of the particular header in order to avoid name clashes so only the actual generated code gets imported elsewhere and the macros used to generate the code don't.

/Edit: As an example, I've used this to generate structs for me. The following is an excerpt from an actual project:

#define MYLIB_MAKE_PC_PROVIDER(name) \
    struct PcApi##name { \
        many members …
    };

MYLIB_MAKE_PC_PROVIDER(SA)
MYLIB_MAKE_PC_PROVIDER(SSA)
MYLIB_MAKE_PC_PROVIDER(AF)

#undef MYLIB_MAKE_PC_PROVIDER

Answer 3

Because preprocessor #defines are all in one global namespace, it's easy for namespace conflicts to result, especially when using third-party libraries. For example, if you wanted to create a function named OpenFile, it might not compile correctly, because the header file <windows.h> defines the token OpenFile to map to either OpenFileA or OpenFileW (depending on if UNICODE is defined or not). The correct solution is to #undef OpenFile before defining your function.