A bit cleaner setup, in my opinion, makes the "x macro" an argument to the user-defined macro, rather than depending on #include. For example, to define an enu

A bit cleaner setup, in my opinion, makes the "x macro" an argument to the user-defined macro, rather than depending on #include. For example, to define an enum along with a string representation function for it: #define DEFINE_ENUM(name, variants) \ enum name { \ variants(DEFINE_ENUM_VARIANT_ITSELF) \ }; \ const char *repr_##name(enum name e) { \ switch (e) { \ variants(DEFINE_ENUM_VARIANT_REPR_CASE) \ default: return "?"; \ } \ } #define DEFINE_ENUM_VARIANT_ITSELF(variant) variant, #define DEFINE_ENUM_VARIANT_REPR_CASE(variant) \ case variant: return #variant; // client code: #define foo_variants(x) \ x(FOO_1) \ x(FOO_2) DEFINE_ENUM(foo, foo_variants)