Discussion

It’s hard to find language that’s colorful enough to describe macros, but we’ll try. To quote from [Sutter04] §31:

Macros are obnoxious, smelly, sheet-hogging bedfellows for several reasons, most of which are related to the fact that they are a glorified text-substitution facility whose effects are applied during preprocessing, before any C++ syntax and semantic rules can even begin to apply.