Categories
Coding R

The Problem With #defines

The C/C++ #define mechanism is a very powerful, but very blunt templating approach. It’s a simple textual search-and-replace mechanism, which can be very useful, but not so subtle.

This was illustrated to me today when I ran into a problem with some code for an R extension that I am writing, that interfaces to Reuters market data feeds. The offending code is shown below:


RTRXFileDb* configDb = new RTRXFileDb(configPath);
if (configDb->error()) {
      Rf_error("Error initializing SFC: %s", configDb->errorText());
            return ScalarReal(-1);
}

This code creates an object instance, and checks the boolean member property error() property for problems. If there is a problem, it calls the R function error() to print the error to the R console.

When I tried to compile this code, however, I got the following error:

error C2039: ‘Rf_error’ : is not a member of ‘RTRXFileDb’

This initially confused me, but then I looked at the R header file error.h and found the definition of error():

#define R_ERROR_H_

#ifdef  __cplusplus
extern "C" {
#endif

void    Rf_error(const char *, ...);
void    Rf_warning(const char *, ...);
void    WrongArgCount(const char *);
void    UNIMPLEMENTED(const char *);
void    R_ShowMessage(const char *s);
    

#ifdef  __cplusplus
}
#endif

#ifndef R_NO_REMAP
#define error Rf_error
#define warning Rf_warning
#endif

#endif /* R_ERROR_H_ */

So error is mapped to Rf_error via a #define directive, meaning that whenever the preprocessor encountered the “error” token, it went ahead and replaced it with the R-mapped definition, regardless of its syntactic context. This is normally not a problem, apart from when we get name collisions, as we have here. There are a few potential ways to fix this, none of them ideal. Some of the options are:

  • #define R_NO_REMAP in the preprocessor, which will stop error being mapped to Rf_error, and just use Rf_error explicitly. The problem with this approach is that R_NO_REMAP will undefine a whole bunch of other R functions, making it tedious to replace every one.
  • Change the R header file: either change the #define block to map Rf_error to _error, or some alternative name, and just change the usages of that, or alternatively remove the error mapping completely.
  • Use #undef error and just use Rf_error explicitly (Pointed out on Reddit)

I’m going to go for one of the latter options, as they are the path of least resistance. This was actually a very small issue. But name collisions of this type can potentially be nasty, or at the very least tedious to fix.