I'm trying to concatenate a word in the source code with the expansion of a preprocessor macro. Basically I have foo
somewhere in the code, and with a #define EXPANSION bar
I want to obtain foobar
. However, I'm struggling to find a way to do this, which works with all compilers. For the moment I would be happy if it works with gfortran and ifort.
According to its documentation, the gfortran preprocessor is a C preprocessor running in "traditional mode", which does not have the ##
token paste operator. However, the same effect can be obtained with an empty C-style /**/
comment. The ifort preprocessor seems to behave more like the normal C preprocessor, so normal token pasting does the trick in ifort. Unfortunately the empty /**/
comment does not work in ifort, as the comment is replaced by a single space instead.
Here is a little example:
#define EXPANSION bar
#define CAT(x,y) PASTE(x,y)
#define PASTE(x,y) x ## y
foo/**/EXPANSION
CAT(foo,EXPANSION)
For which gfortran produces:
foobar
foo ## bar
While ifort gives me:
foo bar
foobar
Of course I could choose the right way by checking the predefined macros for both compilers:
#ifdef __GFORTRAN__
foo/**/EXPANSION
#else
CAT(foo,EXPANSION)
#endif
This works for both of them, but it's rather ugly to have the preprocessor conditional for every expansion. I would much rather avoid this and have some macro magic only once in the beginning.
I have seen this answer to another question, which would probably allow me to work around this issue, but I would rather find a solution that does not invoke the preprocessor separately.
I'm not too familiar with the C preprocessor. Maybe there is a simple way to do what I want. Any ideas?
EDIT: I've already tried something like this:
#define EXPANSION bar
#define CAT(x,y) PASTE(x,y)
#ifdef __GFORTRAN__
#define PASTE(x,y) x/**/y
#else
#define PASTE(x,y) x ## y
#endif
CAT(foo,EXPANSION)
Unfortunately this does not work in gfortran where it produces fooEXPANSION
. I'm not entirely sure how this works, but apparently the expansion of the CAT
macro prevents the expansion of EXPANSION
in the same line. I suspect that this is a feature of the "traditional" C preprocessor ...