[rookie1010]

Hello

are ULONG and WCHAR c or c++ programming keywords

[jaeusm]

No, they are not keywords.

[Review Tech]

I don't believe they are.

[rookie1010]

thanks for the reply,

would they need to be #defined in a header file?

[bla!!]

Yes, they could either be defined in a header file or in the specific file you are editing. What you're doing is declaring a Macro.

#define MACRO VALUE

Example

#define ULONG 256
#define MAX 512
#define EMAIL "bla@bla.com"

All this does is tells the linker to replace any instances of ULONG, MAX and EMAIL anywhere in the code with their respective values.

[rookie1010]

thanks for the reply

so what one would do is define macros depending upon the architecture.

[bla!!]

That's one thing they are used for. I personally use them so the code is easily modified. Say I'm reading lots of input, and I only want my program to use up so much memory. I use the following code

#define MAXLEN 512

char line1[MAXLEN];
char line2[MAXLEN];
char line3[MAXLEN];

I realize later that only having buffers of length 512 isn't enough, so I want to change them to 1024. By defining the macro MAXLEN all I need to change is the value at the top, not all of them throughout the program. I believe you can use macros to help make your programs more architecture independent using #ifndef and then check what platform you are running on (this would be at complie time, not runtime).

Macros can do different things depending on the language you're writing in. I'm moslty familiar with C, so that's what my example is in. I belive you can do a lot more "nifty" things with them in more advanced languages.

[rookie1010]

thanks for the reply dude