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Extended macro example

Here are some examples of macros taken from actual working C code, in this case the code of GNU Emacs, the text editor of choice for many C programmers, and in fact the editor in which this edition of the book was written.

Most of the macro examples below define various types of integer as having certain sizes. It can be very useful when doing advanced C programming to know whether a long integer, for instance, is 32 or 64 bits long on your system; if you select the wrong size, your code might crash or might not even compile. In the case of Emacs, the maximum size of certain variables (how many bits they contain) affects every aspect of its operation, even determining how long an Emacs text file can be.

Each piece of code below is prefixed with the name of the file from which the code is taken, and followed by a note on some interesting features of the macros defined.