12.2 Macros with semicolons

Macros which needn’t (or mustn’t) be followed by a semicolon when you invoke them, macros with semicolons, are very common. These can cause CC Mode to parse the next line wrongly as a statement-cont (see Function Symbols) and thus mis-indent it.

You can prevent this by specifying which macros have semicolons. It doesn’t matter whether or not such a macro has a parameter list:

User Option: c-macro-names-with-semicolon

This buffer-local variable specifies which macros have semicolons. After setting its value, you need to call c-make-macro-with-semi-re for it to take effect. It should be set to one of these values:

nil

There are no macros with semicolons.

a list of strings

Each string is the name of a macro with a semicolon. Only valid #define names are allowed here. For example, to set the default value, you could write the following into your .emacs:

(setq c-macro-names-with-semicolon
      '("Q_OBJECT" "Q_PROPERTY" "Q_DECLARE" "Q_ENUMS"))

a regular expression

This matches each symbol which is a macro with a semicolon. It must not match any string which isn’t a valid #define name. For example:

(setq c-macro-names-with-semicolon
      "\\<\\(CLEAN_UP_AND_RETURN\\|Q_[[:upper:]]+\\)\\>")

Function: c-make-macro-with-semi-re

Call this (non-interactive) function, which sets internal variables, each time you change the value of c-macro-names-with-semicolon. It takes no arguments, and its return value has no meaning. This function is called by CC Mode’s initialization code.