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Comment by awestroke | Hacker News Reader

The if statements are just cpp, executed at compile time

> Many of these are so custom to the webkit codebase, you won’t even find any results for them in Google

It's on Google, you just searched incorrectly

Anything starting '-' won't show up on Google, it will literally give you empty results, so that's why -webkit-match-parent gives nothing and webkit-match-parent works.

Just surround anything prefixed with a "-" in quotes.

"-webkit-match-parent"

Ya beat me to it. There's all kinda good little search tricks like that besides just the quotes, too. Really effective search engine research skills are almost an art-form these days. ;)

this reminds me of https://nautil.us/blog/impossibly-hungry-judges: google has the majority of github repos indexed (although isn't always great at giving you the best result), and webkit is a pretty popular software. unless this parameter was added to the codebase literally minutes ago, google should have at least some results. the fact that absolutely no results show up means that something is either wrong with google, or more likely, your query.

It's a Google feature that isn't very smart... adding a dash before a word will exclude results containing that word

I suspect it trips up people that don't know this more than it's actually used.

It's not that the "-" prefix is just a harmless undocumented feature that only (a few) people who know about it use, it's more that it's an insidious undocumented foot gun that shoots (most) people who don't know about it when they use it accidentally.

Google should at least show a user friendly help message at the top of the page, that actually teaches users about the filtering feature, and lets you turn it off, like:

    Results containing "webkit-match-parent" omitted because of "-" prefix. (Click to include.)

But that would reduce the ad surface area by a tiny amount, so oh well...

They'd probably solve most of their problems by simply recognizing that a single term with a - isn't an exclusion, because it returns no results. That's like... a 10 minute regex fix

Specifically, prefixing a term with a "-" excludes results with that term, though I would expect for it to be ignored if it's the only term in the query.

Developers going without knowing what preprocessors do is… getting unfortunately common. Back in the olden days some people were using the C preprocessor on JavaScript. Being bilingual helps in programming too, everyone!

> getting unfortunately common

I would say fortunately common. The sooner the C preprocessor (and C itself for that matter) can die, the better for everybody.

Compiler macros are not unique to C, and are even in “modern” languages like Swift and NIM. They solve specific problems usefully that often have no other good solution.

Don’t remove it, improve it!

Sure, but macros in other languages are hygienic rather than copy-paste systems, and are therefore much safer (and easier to use for complex use cases, although the C preprocessor might be easier for really simple cases).

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