Has anyone ever had a use for the __COUNTER__ pre-processor macro?

Question

The __COUNTER__ symbol is provided by VC++ and GCC, and gives an increasing non-negative integral value each time it is used.

I\'m interested to learn w

Answer 1

It is used by Boost.Asio to implement stackless coroutines.

See this header file and examples.

Resulting coroutines look like this:

struct task : coroutine
{
  ...
  void operator()()
  {
    reenter (this)
    {
      while (... not finished ...)
      {
         ... do something ...
         yield;
         ... do some more ...
         yield;
       }
     }
   }
   ...
};