Conditional-Uses.html 4.0 KB

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344454647484950515253545556575859606162636465666768697071727374757677787980818283848586878889909192939495969798
  1. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
  2. <html>
  3. <!-- Copyright (C) 1987-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
  4. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
  5. under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
  6. any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. A copy of
  7. the license is included in the
  8. section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
  9. This manual contains no Invariant Sections. The Front-Cover Texts are
  10. (a) (see below), and the Back-Cover Texts are (b) (see below).
  11. (a) The FSF's Front-Cover Text is:
  12. A GNU Manual
  13. (b) The FSF's Back-Cover Text is:
  14. You have freedom to copy and modify this GNU Manual, like GNU
  15. software. Copies published by the Free Software Foundation raise
  16. funds for GNU development. -->
  17. <!-- Created by GNU Texinfo 6.7, http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/ -->
  18. <head>
  19. <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
  20. <title>Conditional Uses (The C Preprocessor)</title>
  21. <meta name="description" content="Conditional Uses (The C Preprocessor)">
  22. <meta name="keywords" content="Conditional Uses (The C Preprocessor)">
  23. <meta name="resource-type" content="document">
  24. <meta name="distribution" content="global">
  25. <meta name="Generator" content="makeinfo">
  26. <link href="index.html" rel="start" title="Top">
  27. <link href="Index-of-Directives.html" rel="index" title="Index of Directives">
  28. <link href="index.html#SEC_Contents" rel="contents" title="Table of Contents">
  29. <link href="Conditionals.html" rel="up" title="Conditionals">
  30. <link href="Conditional-Syntax.html" rel="next" title="Conditional Syntax">
  31. <link href="Conditionals.html" rel="prev" title="Conditionals">
  32. <style type="text/css">
  33. <!--
  34. a.summary-letter {text-decoration: none}
  35. blockquote.indentedblock {margin-right: 0em}
  36. div.display {margin-left: 3.2em}
  37. div.example {margin-left: 3.2em}
  38. div.lisp {margin-left: 3.2em}
  39. kbd {font-style: oblique}
  40. pre.display {font-family: inherit}
  41. pre.format {font-family: inherit}
  42. pre.menu-comment {font-family: serif}
  43. pre.menu-preformatted {font-family: serif}
  44. span.nolinebreak {white-space: nowrap}
  45. span.roman {font-family: initial; font-weight: normal}
  46. span.sansserif {font-family: sans-serif; font-weight: normal}
  47. ul.no-bullet {list-style: none}
  48. -->
  49. </style>
  50. </head>
  51. <body lang="en">
  52. <span id="Conditional-Uses"></span><div class="header">
  53. <p>
  54. Next: <a href="Conditional-Syntax.html" accesskey="n" rel="next">Conditional Syntax</a>, Up: <a href="Conditionals.html" accesskey="u" rel="up">Conditionals</a> &nbsp; [<a href="index.html#SEC_Contents" title="Table of contents" rel="contents">Contents</a>][<a href="Index-of-Directives.html" title="Index" rel="index">Index</a>]</p>
  55. </div>
  56. <hr>
  57. <span id="Conditional-Uses-1"></span><h3 class="section">4.1 Conditional Uses</h3>
  58. <p>There are three general reasons to use a conditional.
  59. </p>
  60. <ul>
  61. <li> A program may need to use different code depending on the machine or
  62. operating system it is to run on. In some cases the code for one
  63. operating system may be erroneous on another operating system; for
  64. example, it might refer to data types or constants that do not exist on
  65. the other system. When this happens, it is not enough to avoid
  66. executing the invalid code. Its mere presence will cause the compiler
  67. to reject the program. With a preprocessing conditional, the offending
  68. code can be effectively excised from the program when it is not valid.
  69. </li><li> You may want to be able to compile the same source file into two
  70. different programs. One version might make frequent time-consuming
  71. consistency checks on its intermediate data, or print the values of
  72. those data for debugging, and the other not.
  73. </li><li> A conditional whose condition is always false is one way to exclude code
  74. from the program but keep it as a sort of comment for future reference.
  75. </li></ul>
  76. <p>Simple programs that do not need system-specific logic or complex
  77. debugging hooks generally will not need to use preprocessing
  78. conditionals.
  79. </p>
  80. </body>
  81. </html>