26.2 Directives

Preprocessing directives are lines in the program that start with ‘#’. Whitespace is allowed before and after the ‘#’. The ‘#’ is followed by an identifier, the directive name. It specifies the operation to perform. Here are a couple of examples:

#define LIMIT 51
  #   undef LIMIT
# error You screwed up!

We usually refer to a directive as #name where name is the directive name. For example, #define means the directive that defines a macro.

The ‘#’ that begins a directive cannot come from a macro expansion. Also, the directive name is not macro expanded. Thus, if foo is defined as a macro expanding to define, that does not make #foo a valid preprocessing directive.

The set of valid directive names is fixed. Programs cannot define new preprocessing directives.

Some directives require arguments; these make up the rest of the directive line and must be separated from the directive name by whitespace. For example, #define must be followed by a macro name and the intended expansion of the macro.

A preprocessing directive cannot cover more than one line. The line can, however, be continued with backslash-newline, or by a ‘/*…*/’-style comment that extends past the end of the line. These will be replaced (by nothing, or by whitespace) before the directive is processed.