[boost] Re: Filesystem library updated

From: Gennaro Prota (gennaro_prota_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-07-18 14:09:29

On Thu, 18 Jul 2002 09:06:17 -0500, "William E. Kempf"
<williamkempf_at_[hidden]> wrote:

>> >Gennaro Prota wrote:
>>
>> Ooops... there was a misunderstanding. I was thinking of macros that
>> don't simply expand to function names, which presumably was what
>> William had in mind too (otherwise why raising the problem of the
>> scope resolution operator?)
>
>No, I was referring to both types.  I believe the why was illustrated in
>another post.  Even something as simple as SearchPath being defined to
>SearchPathA and SearchPathW can lead to problems that namespaces can't fix.
>

I still think there's some misunderstanding. I meant that, in that
case, it would be ok to write :: SearchPath. In general I was saying
that if what appears as a Win32 API call of the form

       function_name ( arg-list )      // (*)

is instead

      macro_name (arg-list)

and macro-name is defined as

#define macro_name    function_name

then putting a :: in front of (*) doesn't cause any syntax error.

If macro_name doesn not expand to a function name (e.g. MAKELANGID)
we, of course, won't use any "::" 

>> Also (mea culpa), I didn't check whether there are such macros in the
>> filesystem library sources.
>
>There's a bunch of them ;).

William, of course there are a lot of macro names that don't expand to
function names. And for those nobody would use the scope resolution
operator.

For the "they seem function" group, a quick - non sistematic - glance
at the sources showed the following names:

CopyFile                        mf
CreateDirectory                 mf
DeleteFile                      mf
FindClose                       F
FindFirstFile                   mf
FindNextFile                    mf
FormatMessage                   mf
GetCurrentDirectory             mf
GetFileAttributes               mf
GetFileAttributesEx             mf
GetLastError                    F
LocalFree                       ?
MAKELANGID                      <macro>
MoveFile                        mf
RemoveDirectory                 mf

Those marked with 'mf' are expanded to function names. FindClose,
GetLastError and LocalFree appear to be actual function names (the
question mark on the last one is due to a little hack I found in a
file named edkdebug.h in the vc98/include directory, which anyhow
doesn't affect the filesystem library).

My point was that, except for MAKELANGID, all those names could be
prefixed with ::

In any case, as I said, it's not a big harm if everything remains as
is.

Genny.