ELEVENWORDINLINE when to use it? - ios

Question

I was always wondering what can I do with things like that:
ONEWORDINLINE(w1)
TWOWORDINLINE(w1, w2)
THREEWORDINLINE(w1, w2, w3)
up to
TENWORDINLINE(w1, w2, w3, w4, w5, w6, w7, w8, w9, w10)
ELEVENWORDINLINE(w1, w2, w3, w4, w5, w6, w7, w8, w9, w10, w11)
TWELVEWORDINLINE(w1, w2, w3, w4, w5, w6, w7, w8, w9, w10, w11, w12)
How to use this macros?
When to use them?
Why from 1 to 12 and
not to...100 for example?

Answer 1

That is long-dead technology of the ancient Mac programmers, sentry to a tomb best left untouched. But, if you're interested, off we go, brave adventurer!
Here are the relevant #define-s straight from Apple:
#define ONEWORDINLINE(w1) = w1
#define TWOWORDINLINE(w1,w2) = {w1,w2}
#define THREEWORDINLINE(w1,w2,w3) = {w1,w2,w3}
/* ...etc... */
#define TWELVEWORDINLINE(w1,w2,w3,w4,w5,w6,w7,w8,w9,w10,w11,w12) = {w1,w2,w3,w4,w5,w6,w7,w8,w9,w10,w11,w12}
Now to some explaining.
A little history lesson: back in the ancient times days when Mac was implemented for the (just as ancient) Motorola 68k, Apple set up its system-calls in the following highly compact and very usable way: they mapped them to words starting with 1010b (0xA), as they were reserved by the Motorola devs for this use. These sys-calls and their mappings were called A-Traps for this hex value (no relation to "IT'S A TRAP!", honestly). They looked like this in hex: 0xA869 (this example is the A-Trap for the FixRatio(short numer, short denom) system-call). This technology was originally created for the Mac Toolbox API.
When a Mac-on-68k-targeting compiler (these should set the TARGET_OS_MAC and TARGET_CPU_68K macros as 1 or TRUE and TARGET_RT_MAC_CFM as 0 or FALSE, BTW) saw a function prototype with an assignment (=) after it, it treated the prototype as referring to an A-Trap system call indicated by the A-Trap value to the right of the assignment operator, which could be a single integer literal one-word value starting with 0xA (0xA???). So, ONEWORDINLINE was basically a stylish macro-way of saying "it's an A-Trap!".
So, here's what a sys-call function prototype declaration for 68k would look like:
EXTERN_API(Fixed) FixRatio(short numer, short denom) ONEWORDINLINE(0xA869);
This would be preprocessed to something like this:
extern Fixed FixRatio(short numer, short denom) = 0xA869;
Now, you might be thinking: if we're indexing system calls by one word, and one-fourth that word is taken by the huge 0xA, that'd be only 4096 functions at maximum (there was much less in reality, as many A-Traps actually mapped to the same system-call subroutines, but with different parameters), how is that enough? Well, obviously, it isn't. That's where selectors come in.
A-Traps like _HFSDispatch (0xA260) were called "selectors" because they had the job of selecting and calling another subroutine determined by values on the stack. So, when a function prototype was "assigned" an "array" of one-word integer literals, all but the last one (called the selector code(s)) got pushed onto the stack, and the last one was treated as an A-Trap selector that grabbed the words pushed onto the stack and called the appropriate subroutine. The maximum number of words in such an array was 12 because that was enough for the Mac Toolbox.
The macros TWOWORDINLINE through TWELVEWORDINLINE handled selector A-Traps. For example:
EXTERN_API(OSErr) ActivateTSMDocument(TSMDocumentID idocID) TWOWORDINLINE(0x7002, 0xAA54);
would be preprocessed to something like
extern OSErr ActivateTSMDocument(TSMDocumentID idocID) = {0x7002, 0xAA54};
Here, 0x7002 is the selector code, and 0xAA54 is the selector A-Trap.
So, to sum it all up, you only need it if you want to do some coding for pre-1994 Mac-s running on a Motorola 68k. So ios isn't really in place here ;)
Disclaimer: I know this stuff in theory only and I may have made a mistake somewhere. If there are any old-timers experienced with this stuff, please correct me if I got something wrong!