[erlang-questions] ?DATE and ?TIME MACROs

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 8 Oct 2008, at 7:41 pm, Richard Carlsson wrote:
> FUNCTION, however, does not really belong in the preprocessor, because
> it can never be expanded at preprocessing time to a literal (so that  
> you
> can e.g. use it in a pattern); it must expand to a runtime call

It can't be expanded at preprocessing time to a literal, true.
But it CAN be expanded at preprocessing time to a
	{location,Line_Number,function}
token which the *parser* can expand to a literal (so that you can
for example use it in a pattern).  (Actually, with a bit more work,
the preprocessor *could* do that part as well, but this would mean
repeating work already done by the parser, so I wouldn't do it that
way.)