On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 4:52 PM, Nelson, Clark <clark.nelson_at_[hidden]>wrote:

> I wanted to get feedback from authors of proposals on macro names to
> represent their features as soon as possible; I started by turning Tom's
> list of C++11 features into a table in the same style as what we already
> have for C++14. (As background, please remember that, to the greatest
> degree that makes sense, I'm tending to use words from the title of the
> proposal paper to name the feature-test macro.)
>
> The title of N2235, by which "constexpr" was introduced into C++, was
> basically "Generalized Constant Expressions". So the more or less mindless
> name of the macro might be "__cpp_generalized_constant".
>
> Whereas N3652, which eliminates the constraints on a constexpr function,
> is entitled, in part, "Relaxing constraints on constexpr functions"; hence
> "__cpp_relaxed_constexpr".
>
> It hardly seems likely that we will want to use the word "generalized" as
> part of two different macro names regarding constexpr -- but we could
> conceivably decide that this is a case for changing the value of a macro,
> instead of defining a new one.
>
> >From my perspective as an implementer, the change that was voted into
> C++14 doesn't seem minor or subtle, but I guess opinions might differ.
>
> Comments?


I don't think either *generalized* or *relaxed* is sufficiently
future-proof. What happens if C++17 generalizes constants further or
relaxes more constexpr restrictions? And do we really want people to need
to remember which features were "generalized" and which were "relaxed"?
More generally, I don't think we should use names which describe a
difference between C++ version N and C++ version N+1; instead, we should
pick names which describe the features objectively (names which still make
sense as features of C++ version aleph_0).

So, some strawman proposals:

1) For N2235, use __cpp_constexpr (emphasizing the new keyword)
For N3652, use __cpp_constexpr_statements (emphasizing that this is an
extension of __cpp_constexpr, and that the primary change is that it
permits almost any statements in constexpr functions)
2) N2235 has #define __cpp_constexpr 1, and N3652 has #define
__cpp_constexpr 2.
3) N2235 has #define __cpp_constexpr 201103L and N3652 has #define
__cpp_constexpr 2014xxL.