The true advantage of C# over C++

Judah Gabriel Himango

Christopher Duncan wrote:

Does C# have the equivalent of the C/C++ #define?

Yes and no -- yes you can alias types and no you cannot do what you just posted. You can do a class-wide #define in this sense:

using IntList = System.Collections.Generic.List<int>;

But it applies only to the current class. Other classes will see your IntList as the good old List<int>. Another limitation is, it's only a type alias. You cannot alias things like keywords or language-specific symbols, which I think is a great way to keep people from writing abominations like this[^] or this[^]. :-)

Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. I'm currently blogging about: God-as-Judge, God-as-Forgiver The apostle Paul, modernly speaking: Epistles of Paul Judah Himango

PIEBALDconsult

I use the "C pre-processor" with my C#, I'm just that kind of guy. So yes, I have the same # define. (And I compile from the command-line... with a bat file, although I suppose make can do it too.)

"C:\Program files\mingw\bin\cpp" -include "C:\Projects\PIEBALD\Defines.hs" -P -C -D__Csharp=# -w %1.cs %1.csi
csc.exe @"C:\batfiles\Build.rsp" %1.csi

When I do want the C# # define, which is very rare, I write __Csharp define instead. This is mostly from years of using Pro*C; I'd pass the code through CPP (or equivalent), then through the Pro*C pre-compiler, and then into the C compiler. The downside is that my line numbers are off by one, but I can live with that.

Nemanja Trifunovic

Haven't used _T() in a while :) (yeah, Linux...) Anyway, if you ask me, the true advantage of C# over C++ is that it is developed by Microsoft, and not the "Standard Comitee". Heck, they (MS) managed to turn a joke that C# 1.0 was into the most advanced mainstream language[^] (this story about MS products getting decent around version 3.0 seems to have something about it after all) and we are still hoping that type inference and lambdas will get adopted by the Standard around 2010 if we are lucky, and then it would take another 5 years for the compiler vendors to catch up :mad: Well, at least we have real destructors :)

Programming Blog utf8-cpp

Nish Nishant

Nemanja Trifunovic wrote:

Well, at least we have real destructors

:laugh:

Regards, Nish

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Currently working on C++/CLI in Action for Manning Publications. (*Sample chapter available online*)

Matt Gerrans

Anyway _T() and @"" are not doing the same thing. _T() does L"" for Unicode, nothing for ANSI, whereas @"" allows you to do raw strings (strings that don't process escape characters). In C# you don't have to fool with single- vs. double-byte strings because they are all double byte. You can do the same in a C++ program by using wstring and L"" and then you don't neeed the ugly _T() macro. However, I don't know of any way to do raw strings in C++. Yes, C# does have a limited #define, but it -- thankfully -- doesn't do macros. It is just for #ifdef/#ifndef kind of stuff.

Matt Gerrans

Jorgen Sigvardsson

Just make the builds unicode. :~ Assuming you don't have the misfortune of supporting braindead win9x OSs...

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Luis Alonso Ramos

Joergen Sigvardsson wrote:

Just make the builds unicode.

It has been a long time, but doesn't in Unicode builds "" still produce ANSI strings? L"" is a Unicode string:

#ifdef _UNICODE
#define _T(str) L#str
#else
#define _T(str) str
#endif

or something like that.

Luis Alonso Ramos Intelectix Chihuahua, Mexico

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Shog9 0

Joergen Sigvardsson wrote:

Just make the builds unicode.

I do. But even then, my choices are between _T("String!") and L"String!" - with the latter making it troublesome to re-use some code in non-Unicode apps.

Jorgen Sigvardsson

Yes, you'll need the L prefix, but that is in my opinion a minor peeve compared to _T().

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peterchen

But Nish! That's you, aka "the C++.NET guy"! But yes, you make an absolutely important point. Languages today are judged not just inside the domain of "programming languages in general/theory", but how well they work together with IDE tools.

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peterchen

5 words, and a full spelling bug :doh:

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