Variadic macros and trailing commas

One of the great new (ok, 14-year old) features of C99 is the variadic macro. This feature finally provides a portable way to write a logging macro, for example. Here's a simple example:

#define LOGIFY(format, ...) \
    fprintf(stderr, "LOG: " format "\n", \
    __VA_ARGS__)
...
LOGIFY("Found %d widgets.", widgetCount);
...

However, there's a subtle problem here. What if we call LOGIFY with no variadic arguments?

LOGIFY("Finished.");

This expands to:

fprintf(stderr, "LOG: Finished.\n",);

And that doesn't compile, because there's a trailing comma.

GCC provides an extension to the language which works around this problem. For that compiler, you can use token pasting to make the comma magically disappear:

#define LOGIFY(format, ...) \
    fprintf(stderr, "LOG: " format "\n", \
    ##__VA_ARGS__)

However this is non-portable.

StackOverflow suggests that you can make the format part of the variadic part of the macro:

#define LOGIFY(...) \

    fprintf(stderr, "LOG: " __VA_ARGS__)

However this doesn't work for my example because I want to be able to past a new line onto the end of the format string. Since the format string isn't isolated from the arguments I can't append anything to it.

An ugly work-around is to simply pass in an extra, unused argument if you have no real arguments:

LOGIFY("Finished.", 0);

It's always harmless to pass extra arguments to a variadic function, and this does compile, but it doesn't seem very elegant.

If the ANSI C committee ever revisits this, or if I design my own language, they (or I) could resolve this problem by permitting trailing commas in function calls (and function declarations). C already permits trailing commas in array initializers (as do Java and other C-like languages):

int fibs[] = {1,1,2,3,5,8,13,};

This is convenient for a number of reasons, including conditional inclusion (#ifdef) and source code generation. It can also be a good habit to always include a trailing comma, especially when declaring arrays of strings. Without a trailing comma, there's a risk that a developer might add a new string to the end of the list without a comma. Since CPP does string concatenation, the results may be unexpected!

const char * messages[] = {

    "No error",           // 0; added in 2002

    "First legacy error", // added in 2002

    "Other legacy error"  // added in 2002

    "Brand new error"     // new in 2013

};

The same problem can occur with numbers if sign tokens (+/-) are used.

Why not support trailing commas in functions, too? It would be more consistent, and there are a number of not-immediately-obvious advantages. In addition to this variadic macro case, consider the case where one or more of the arguments is conditionally included:

void

doWork(

    int howMuchWork,

    WorkType whatKindOfWork,

#ifdef THREAD_SAFE

    bool useLocks

#endif

)

...

This doesn't compile if THREAD_SAFE isn't defined because there's an unused comma after the second argument. If C permitted trailing commas here we'd avoid awkward constructs like moving the comma into the conditional code (and even that wouldn't work if each of the arguments were conditional!).

Although it's not consistent with the normal usage of commas in prose the trailing comma is surprisingly useful in programming languages, and ought to be supported more widely.