Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: > ... I wonder if it would be more natural for it to take > pointers-to-objects, making it look more like a real function (i.e., > SWAP(&a, &b) instead of SWAP(a, b)". And then these funny corner cases > become quite obvious in the caller, because the caller is the one who > has to type "&". Hmmmm. While this looks very attractive in theory by forcing 'a' and 'b' to be lvalues, it probably invites mistakes go unnoticed during the review when the code wants to swap two pointer variables. For example, apply.c: SWAP(p->new_name, p->old_name); is now a bug and will swap only the first byte of these names, and the correct way to spell it would become: apply.c: SWAP(&p->new_name, &p->old_name); The latter clearly looks like swapping the new and old names, which is good, but I do not have any confidence that I will immediately spot a bug when presented the former under the new world order.