Reason why not to have a DELETE macro for C++

Question

Are there any good reasons (except \"macros are evil\", maybe) NOT to use the following macros ?

#define DELETE( ptr ) \\
i         


        

Answer 1

Your macro fails for several reasons:

• It is a macro. It doesn't respect scoping rules or a number of other language features, making it easy to use incorrectly.
• It can cause compile-errors: DELETE (getPtr()); won't compile, because you can't set the function call to null. Or if the pointer is const, your macro will also fail.
• It achieves nothing. delete NULL is allowed by the standard.

Finally, as grimner said, you're trying to solve a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. Why are you manually calling delete at all?` Don't you use the standard library containers? Smart pointers? Stack allocation? RAII?

As Stroustrup has said before, the only way to avoid memory leaks is to avoid having to call delete.