Puzzling sample code

1

Hey all,
Just starting to play around with BeOS… d/l BeOS PE MAX v3.1 Beta 1, and noticed that this was one of the best forums, in terms of activity. I thought I’d post a question since there seems to be some very knowledgeable people here.

In the sample code, BasicButton, there is a string literal that is defined in one of the header files:

#define BUTTON_MSG ‘PRES’

This string literal gets used in the constructor of a BMessage object, which in turn is used in the constructor of a BButton object.

What I’m scratching my head about is that I’ve never seen string literals in C/C++ use single quotations. I was thinking that this is illegal. I notice that the sample code compiles and runs with seemingly no problem. Can someone clarify what the heck is going on?

Thanks!
Sherpa78

2

D’OH! I’m an idiot. The string literal is 4 letters long. Each letter is an 8-byte character. 4 of them create an uint32 value.

Sorry for the brain fart. It just threw me for a loop because I had never seen it done like that before… kind of a cool idea, really. :slight_smile: