Other sections in this book have focused on C++'s powerful support for generic programming and object-oriented programming. Still and all, there's something to be said for plain old functions, and even for the macro facilities inherited (so to speak) from the C language.
Have you ever used a language that supported nested functions? If so, you might have wondered whether it's possible, or worthwhile, to try to get the same effect in C++, and you can find the answer in Item 33. What are preprocessor macros good for, even though much of the time they can be downright evil? Turn to Items 34 and 35 for these answers and more.
But first, there's a certain kind of "machine-like" programming structure that's incredibly useful in many application domains and crops up frequently in real-world systems. From a language point of view, this structure can often make it desirable to write functions that return pointers to ” themselves ! What is this programming structure, and how can we write such odd-looking recursive function declarations? For the answer, turn to Item 32.
