C preprocessor syntax for multi-statement function? - c

#include <stdio.h>
#define mean(x,N) ( double _sum=0.0; for (int _i=0;_i<N;++_i) _sum+=x[_i]; _sum/N )
int main() {
const int N=100;
int i[N]; double d[N];
// here we fill the arrays with data, and then
printf("%f %f %f\n", mean(i,N), mean(d,N));
}
how does one define the macro appropriately in pure C, or accomplish this in another way without coding two functions?

A macro will not work in this situation.
A parameter to a function must be an expression. What you have above is not an expression but a sequence of statements. You can't get around this with the loop you have.
Just define functions, one accepting a double * and an int and the other a accepting a int * and an int, to perform this action. Don't use a macro where a function will do.

There is no portable way to write a macro to return a value from a statement, especially a complex statement. You want to use a macro to implement a polymorphic thing... You can use C++ overloaded functions for this purpose.
For C, you can write a macro that updates a variable and pass that variable to printf. Beware that macros are notorious sources of non trivial bugs.
You could also use C11 generic functions, but support for these is often missing.
Here is an attempt:
#include <stdio.h>
#define set_mean(res,x,N) do { res = 0; for (int i_ = 0; i_ < (N); i_++) res += (x)[i_]; res /= (N); } while (0)
int main(void) {
const int N = 100;
int i[N];
double d[N];
double ires, dres;
// here we fill the arrays with data, and then
set_mean(ires, i, N);
set_mean(dres, d, N);
printf("%f %f %f\n", ires, dres);
}

Related

How to pass each value of an array as parameters to a function?

I have the following function that accepts a varying number of integer parameters and returns the sum.
int sum(int a, ...){
va_list nums;
va_start(nums, a);
int res=0;
for(int i=0; i<a; i++) {
res += va_arg(nums, int);
}
va_end(nums);
return res;
}
I need to pass each value of the array as a parameter to the function rather than passing the array itself. The array can be of varying length leading to a varying length of arguments to pass too.
printf("The sum is: %d", sum(size, args[0], args[1], ```need all elements of args[] array here```));
To put forth some perspective, I'm using this sum function to understand how I can go about doing this. It would be helpful to know how to achieve this in a more general setting rather than this exact function.
Please let me know if you need any more information.
Please do look at this question, which is similar, however, I require a solution in C.
The short answer is that there's no way to do exactly this in the C language. There is no ES6-like spread operator in C, nor similar functionality. I don't think there's any particular reason why they couldn't (you would just have to push more arguments onto the stack); they just never made one.
However, there are various other things you can do:
If variadic arguments were already passed into the function calling your function, you can pass along the va_list to a function declared to take a va_list. See Passing variable arguments to another function that accepts a variable argument list
As #JonathanLeffer suggests, the most natural way to write this code in C is by constructing an array of what "would be" your variadic arguments, and passing that into a function that expects an array (well, technically, a pointer, because arrays decay to pointers). For example:
int sum_array(int a, int nums[]){
int res=0;
for(int i=0; i<a; i++) {
res += nums[i];
}
return res;
}
In certain circumstances, it may be more convenient for a function like sum_array to take only the nums array/pointer, which would itself indicate the end of the array with a 0 or -1 value in the last slot. This is just another convention for indicating the end, which the caller has to set up.
You could then, if you really wanted to, write a variadic function that collects its arguments into an array and calls sum_array, if you want a variadic version as well. (Of course, you could also just implement the variadic and array versions separately, but for nontrivial functions it may be a pain to implement them twice.)
int sum_variadic(int a, ...){
va_list nums;
va_start(nums, a);
int arr[a];
for(int i=0; i<a; i++) {
arr[i] = va_arg(nums, int);
}
va_end(nums);
return sum_array(a, arr);
}
you could also use a variadic macro for the same purpose:
#define sum_macro(size, ...) sum_array(size, (int[]){__VA_ARGS__})
In summary: going from variadic to array in C is trivial, going from array to variadic is impossible.
You can also use extensions to the C language to do it anyway, as described in Passing a dynamic set of variadic arguments to a C function and In C, given a variable list of arguments, how to build a function call using them?, which #KamilCuk linked to.
You can avoid passing the number of arguments explicitly by using a variadic macro that constructs a compound literal array instead of a vararg function:
#include <stdio.h>
#define sum_int(...) (sum_int)(sizeof((int[]){__VA_ARGS__}) / sizeof(int), (int[]){__VA_ARGS__})
int (sum_int)(size_t count, const int *a) {
int sum = 0;
for (size_t i = 0; i < count; i++) {
sum += a[i];
}
return sum;
}
int main() {
printf("sum = %d\n", sum_int(1, 2, 3));
return 0;
}
This approach can be used for any purpose, as long as the types of the variable arguments are converted implicitly to the array type.
If you want to pass just the arguments to your sum function without changing its definition, you can use a variation of the macro:
#include <stdio.h>
int sum(int a, ...) {
va_list nums;
va_start(nums, a);
int res = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < a; i++) {
res += va_arg(nums, int);
}
va_end(nums);
return res;
}
#define sum(...) (sum)((int)(sizeof((int[]){__VA_ARGS__}) / sizeof(int)), __VA_ARGS__)
int main() {
printf("sum = %d\n", sum(1, 2, 3));
return 0;
}
Note however that there is no type checking with this approach and sum(1, 2.0, 3) would have undefined behavior.

Can macro in c generate serialized statement? [duplicate]

I want to generate an array initializer with arbitrary logic that unfortunately requires some looping.
#define RANDOM_ARRAY(n) \
...
double array[] = RANDOM_ARRAY(10);
Suppose the code above generates an initializer for a 10-element array. Is it possible to define such a macro (with a loop) in C99 ?
NB: it doesn't have to be a macro if a function call could suffice (but it has to be possible to call it among global initializers, not in a second function);
Unfortunately, it is not possible to create a recursive (or loop) macrofunction in C. Nevertheless, if you have a reasonable maximum length for your initializer, you can use this type of construct :
#define INITIALIZER(N) { INITIALIZER_ ## N }
#define INITIALIZER_1 1
#define INITIALIZER_2 INITIALIZER_1, 2
#define INITIALIZER_3 INITIALIZER_2, 3
int
main(void)
{
int tab[3] = INITIALIZER(3);
return 0;
}
The C preprocessor doesn't support loops, so what you want is not (easily) possible.
I added the '(easily)' because there are ways to get loop-like behavior using something like boost's ITERATE. This uses recursive file inclusion to emulate a loop. But I'm not sure if you want to go that far.
Since you're working in C99, you can of course create a macro that does the initialization, but you won't be able to make it look like an initializer:
#define INCREMENTING_ARRAY(t,a,n) t a[n]; do {\
for(size_t i = 0; i < n; ++i)\
a[i] = i;\
} while(0);
This creates an array whose elements are initialized to be incrementing, as an example.
Usage:
int main(void)
{
INCREMENTING_ARRAY(int, dozen, 12);
int i;
for(i = 0; i < sizeof dozen / sizeof *dozen; ++i)
printf("array at %d = %d\n", i, dozen[i]);
return 0;
}
This works since in C99 you can freely mix declarations and code, so the int i; after the macro usage is fine. In C89, it wouldn't have worked.

A homework is about use macro

This questions is about my homework.
This topic is need to use like:
#define GENERIC_MAX(type)\
type type##_max(type x, type y)\
{\
return x > y ? x : y;\
}
The content of the question is to make this code run normally:
#include <stdio.h>
GenerateShowValueFunc(double)
GenerateShowValueFunc(int)
int main()
{
double i = 5.2;
int j = 3;
showValue_double(i);
showValue_int(j);
}
The result of the operation is like this:
i=5.2000
j=3
And this code is my current progress, but there are have problems:
#include <stdio.h>
#define printname(n) printf(#n);
#define GenerateShowValueFunc(type)\
type showValue_##type(type x)\
{\
printname(x);\
printf("=%d\n", x);\
return 0;\
}
GenerateShowValueFunc(double)
GenerateShowValueFunc(int)
int main()
{
double i = 5.2;
int j = 3;
showValue_double(i);
showValue_int(j);
}
I don’t know how to make the output change with the type, and I don’t know how to display the name of the variable. OAO
This original task description:
Please refer to ShowValue.c below:
#include <stdio.h>
GenerateShowValueFunc(double)
GenerateShowValueFunc(int)
int main()
{
double i = 5.2;
int j = 3;
showValue_double(i);
showValue_int(j);
}
Through [GenerateShowValueFunc(double)] and [GenerateShowValueFunc(int)] these two lines macro call, can help us to generated as [showValue_double( double )] and [showValue_int( int )] function, And in main() function called. The execution result of this program is as follows:
i=5.2000
j=3
Please insert the code that defines GenerateShowValueFunc macro into the appropriate place in the ShowValue.c program, so that this program can compile and run smoothly.
A quick & dirty solution would be:
type showValue_##type(type x)\
{\
const char* double_fmt = "=%f\n";\
const char* int_fmt = "=%d\n";\
printname(x);\
printf(type##_fmt, x);\
return 0;\
}
The compiler will optimize out the variable that isn't used, so it won't affect performance. But it might yield warnings "variable not used". You can add null statements like (void)double_fmt; to silence it.
Anyway, this is all very brittle and bug-prone, it was never recommended practice to write macros like these. And it is not how you do generic programming in modern C. You can teach your teacher how, by showing them the following example:
#include <stdio.h>
void double_show (double d)
{
printf("%f\n", d);
}
void int_show (int i)
{
printf("%d\n", i);
}
#define show(x) _Generic((x),\
double: double_show, \
int: int_show) (x) // the x here is the parameter passed to the function
int main()
{
double i = 5.2;
int j = 3;
show(i);
show(j);
}
This uses the modern C11/C17 standard _Generic keyword, which can check for types at compile-time. The macro picks the appropriate function to call and it is type safe. The caller doesn't need to worry which "show" function to call nor that they pass the correct type.
Without changing the shown C-code (i.e. only doing macros), which I consider a requirement, the following code has the required output:
#include <stdio.h>
#define showValue_double(input) \
showValueFunc_double(#input"=%.4f\n" , input)
#define showValue_int(input) \
showValueFunc_int(#input"=%d\n" , input)
#define GenerateShowValueFunc(type) \
void showValueFunc_##type(const char format[], type input)\
{\
printf(format, input); \
}
/* ... macro magic above; */
/* unchangeable code below ... */
GenerateShowValueFunc(double)
GenerateShowValueFunc(int)
int main()
{
double i = 5.2;
int j = 3;
showValue_double(i);
showValue_int(j);
}
Output:
i=5.2000
j=3
Note that I created something of a lookup-table for type-specific format specifiers. I.e. for each type to be supported you need to add a macro #define showValue_ .... This is also needed to get the name of the variable into the output.
This uses the fact that two "strings" are concatenated by C compilers, i.e. "A""B" is the same as "AB". Where "A" is the result of #input.
The rest, i.e. the required function definition is very similar to the teacher-provided example, using the ## operator.
Note, this is if the variable name has to correctly be mentioned in the output.
With out the i = things would be easier and would more elegantly use the generated functions WITHOUT having the called showValue_double(i); be explicit macros. I.e. the functions generated are 1:1 what is called from main(). I think that might be what is really asked. Let me know if you want that version.

c double argument being passed as wrong value

I am having an issue with double arguments for a probability function in C.
I have a function that takes a double as an argument:
int binomrand(double p, int n)
{
int i;
int numevents = 0;
for(i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
numevents += bernoullirand(p);
}
return numevents;
}
I pass .85:
int numcoach = binomrand(.85,COACH_SEATS);
but the minute I step into this function, Xcode shows p as such:
p double 5.2511106800094658E-315
Which is off by a factor of at least 10^314. This occurs even before calling bernoullirand, so I haven't included that code here.
E:
Since it was relevant, here was the .h declaration of binomrand:
int binomrand(float p, int n);
This was clearly wrong, but I didn't think to look at it. Note that's "float" and not "double".
When I updated the function from float to double in its .c file, I neglected to do so in its .h file. Multiple answerers realized this quickly.
This can happen if you have not declared the function binomrand before first use or declared it incorrectly. Declare the function on the top of file where you actually use it or use proper header files.
int binomrand(double p, int n); /* Declaration */

Do C functions support an arbitrary number of arguments?

PHP has a func_get_args() for getting all function arguments, and JavaScript has the functions object.
I've written a very simple max() in C
int max(int a, int b) {
if (a > b) {
return a;
} else {
return b;
}
}
I'm pretty sure in most languages you can supply any number of arguments to their max() (or equivalent) built in. Can you do this in C?
I thought this question may have been what I wanted, but I don't think it is.
Please keep in mind I'm still learning too. :)
Many thanks.
You could write a variable-arguments function that takes the number of arguments, for example
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdarg.h>
int sum(int numArgs, ...)
{
va_list args;
va_start(args, numArgs);
int ret = 0;
for(unsigned int i = 0; i < numArgs; ++i)
{
ret += va_arg(args, int);
}
va_end(args);
return ret;
}
int main()
{
printf("%d\n", sum(4, 1,3,3,7)); /* prints 14 */
}
The function assumes that each variable argument is an integer (see va_arg call).
Yes, C has the concept of variadic functions, which is similar to the way printf() allows a variable number of arguments.
A maximum function would look something like this:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdarg.h>
#include <limits.h>
static int myMax (int quant, ...) {
va_list vlst;
int i;
int num;
int max = INT_MIN;
va_start (vlst, quant);
for (i = 0; i < quant; i++) {
if (i == 0) {
max = va_arg (vlst, int);
} else {
num = va_arg (vlst, int);
if (num > max) {
max = num;
}
}
}
va_end (vlst);
return max;
}
int main (void) {
printf ("Maximum is %d\n", myMax (5, 97, 5, 22, 5, 6));
printf ("Maximum is %d\n", myMax (0));
return 0;
}
This outputs:
Maximum is 97
Maximum is -2147483648
Note the use of the quant variable. There are generally two ways to indicate the end of your arguments, either a count up front (the 5) or a sentinel value at the back.
An example of the latter would be a list of pointers, passing NULL as the last. Since this max function needs to be able to handle the entire range of integers, a sentinel solution is not viable.
The printf function uses the former approach but slightly differently. It doesn't have a specific count, rather it uses the % fields in the format string to figure out the other arguments.
In fact, this are two questions. First of all C99 only requires that a C implementation may handle at least:
127 parameters in one function
definition
127 arguments in one function call
Now, to your real question, yes there are so-called variadic functions and macros in C99. The syntax for the declaration is with ... in the argument list. The implementation of variadic functions goes with macros from the stdarg.h header file.
here is a link to site that shows an example of using varargs in c Writing a ``varargs'' Function
You can use the va_args function to retrieve the optional arguments you pass to a function. And using this you can pass 0-n optional parameters. So you can support more then 2 arguments if you choose
Another alternative is to pass in an array, like main(). for example:
int myfunc(type* argarray, int argcount);
Yes, you can declare a variadic function in C. The most commonly used one is probably printf, which has a declaration that looks like the following
int printf(const char *format, ...);
The ... is how it declares that it accepts a variable number of arguments.
To access those argument it can uses va_start, va_arg and the like which are typically macros defined in stdarg.h. See here
It is probably also worth noting that you can often "confuse" such a function. For example the following call to printf will print whatever happens to be on the top of the stack when it is called. In reality this is probably the saved stack base pointer.
printf("%d");
C can have functions receive an arbitrary number of parameters.
You already know one: printf()
printf("Hello World\n");
printf("%s\n", "Hello World");
printf("%d + %d is %d\n", 2, 2, 2+2);
There is no max function which accepts an arbitrary number of parameters, but it's a good exercise for you to write your own.
Use <stdarg.h> and the va_list, va_start, va_arg, and va_end identifiers defined in that header.
http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online/pages/man3/stdarg.3.html

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