hardcoded constants

[Simon A Reap]

In article <1988Dec21.133910.23182 at ateng.ateng.com> chip at ateng.ateng.com
						    (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
>According to henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer):
>>Trouble is, often it's almost impossible to devise a meaningful name.
>>I'm not talking about hard-coding things like choice of control characters,
>>but about things like (in a function to concatenate two strings with a
>>'/' in between):
>>	foo = malloc(strlen(a)+strlen(b)+2);	/* 2 for '/' '\0' */
>Not hard:
>	foo = malloc(strlen(a)+sizeof("/")+strlen(b));

Ah, but if we want to concatenate more strings, don't we need something like...

#define TO_CAT_3_STRINGS (-1)
#define TO_CAT_4_STRINGS (-2)
	foo = malloc(strlen(a)+sizeof("/")+strlen(b)+sizeof("/")+
			strlen(c)+TO_CAT_3_STRINGS);
	foo = malloc(strlen(a)+sizeof("/")+strlen(b)+sizeof("/")+
			strlen(b)+sizeof("/")+strlen(c)+TO_CAT_4_STRINGS);

with, of course, negative constants to *really* confuse the beginner :-)
(Yes, I know you could have a single 'sizeof("//")' or sizeof("///") as
required, but that's not really the point, is it?)
-- 
Enjoy,
yerluvinunclesimon             Opinions are mine - my cat has her own ideas
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