a glob of nerdishness

The following tlnum() macro (which I dedicate to the public domain), will allow you to easily create NSNumbers from constant floats and integers in your Objective-C code:


#define TL_FLOATARG(x) ( (x) ? ((x) / (2 * (x))) : (((x) + 1) / 2) )
#define tlnum(x) (TL_FLOATARG(x) ? [NSNumber numberWithDouble:(x)] : [NSNumber numberWithLong:(x)])


You could even rename tlnum() to simply N() if it won’t conflict with anything in your code. Update: Mike Ash pointed out that the TL_FLOATARG trick will not work if 2 * (x) overflows. So until a better macro can be developed, use this with care.

Why would you use this? Well, Objective-C lets you make a constant NSString-like object at compile-time @”like this”. This is extremely handy, as the next easiest way to create a string object is [NSString stringWithUTF8String:"like this"]. Since string objects are used all over the place — as format specifiers, when querying for localized strings or application resources, in any sort of situation where a key is needed… — the @”" syntax saves a lot of typing! Constant number objects aren’t needed quite as often, but almost every Cocoa programmer has at some point wanted to create constant NSNumber-like objects in a similarly succinct and easy way. Using this macro lets you do just that.

While it would be impractical (if not impossible) to create truly constant NSNumber-like objects at compile time using preprocessor macros, I still wanted something that would allow me to replace code like [NSNumber numberWithInt:42] and [NSNumber numberWithDouble:3.14] with something shorter. Furthermore, I wanted *it* to worry about the number’s type for me. I didn’t want to have to call a different macro depending on the number, as this would be require more thought for each use and maybe even more typing.

My first thought was to do something like this, following similar tricks that Dave Dribin used for his to-NSString converter:

// WRONG!
#define tlnum(x) ({ typeof(x) _x = (x); [NSNumber value:&_x withObjCType:@encode(typeof(_x))]; })


This has two problems. For one, the NSNumber subclass does not override -[NSValue value:withObjCType:] and so the object created does not work as an NSNumber at all! I worked around this with my own function that checked the encoded type, but that seemed like overkill. The second problem is that even with a helper function, the code depends on GCC extensions for the block macro and the typeof() operator. I wanted to keep my code within the C99 standard.

Since I was intending this for constant numbers only, and since NSNumber (or at least the CFNumber implementation in the most recent CFLite distribution) uses at least 8 bytes of storage for even chars and bools, the only important distinction is between floats and integers. Thus the TL_FLOATARG, which takes advantage of the fact that 1 / 2 yields the integer 0, while 1.0 / 2 yields a floating-point 0.5. The one gotcha with the final version is that it evaluates its arguments multiple times. My compile settings give a warning, but be careful not to do something like tlnum(i++), as you’ll end up incrementing i multiple times. Jens Ayton kindly provided another macro trick to turn this into an error, but in the end I opted to leave it out for simplicity.

Please enjoy, and I’d be glad to know if this is helpful!