Some documentation and Apple source examples reveal that General/XCode seems to support some helpful pragmas.

The most notable of these is the pragma “mark”. This pragma allows developers to suggest a description for groups of methods. This mark pragma most noticably affects the method finder menu at the top of each editor field. For example:

#pragma mark Drag Helper Methods

Would place a mark in the menu, and subsequent methods will appear beneath it. It also seems that you can place a blank line in the menu (to help grouping) by making your mark just a dash, like so:

#pragma mark -

Also, General/XCode interprets

#pragma mark - My Cool Group

as

#pragma mark -

#pragma mark My Cool Group </code>

With these rules and the default indentation scheme, the menu becomes much easier to rapidly scan through. You can see a good example of this in file:///Developer/Examples/General/DiscRecording/General/ObjectiveC/General/EnhancedDataBurn/General/AppController.m

You can also use more than just a dash. You can put any text you want in the pragma and it will show up in the fuction reference pop-up menu.

#pragma mark Class methods #pragma mark Public object methods #pragma mark Private object methods

If you have large files, this can be very handy.

Does anyone want to list other helpful pragmas if there are any? – General/DaveFayram

As a side note: #pragma mark is new in PB2, IIRC. General/CodeWarrior also had that (or maybe it was MPW) and I really missed it in PB. Proof that Apple do listen to programmers’ requests, so keep filing those bugs! :-) –General/UliKusterer

Another side note, Xcode also accepts, e.g.:

// MARK: Class methods // MARK: -

As an alternative to #pragma mark - General/ChristopherLloyd , credit goes to General/JensAyton for pointing this out

#warning !FIX! only one element and Document Type allowed

Not a #pragma but this creates a compiler warning. It’s often more useful than e.g. “fixme” comments because of the increased visibility.

---

There’s also

#error blah

which comes in useful inside preprocessor conditionals:

#if TARGET_RT_MACHO #include “General/MachoDefinitions.h” #else #error Unsupported runtime - No customized definitions available #endif

and there is

#pragma unused(varname)

which lets you suppress the “unused variable” warning for dummy parameters.

–General/UliKusterer

---

Though the most portable way to supress the “unused variable” warning is to do this:

int foo (int bar) { (void)bar; return 0; }

then you won’t get warnings about ‘unknown pragmas’. See this thread more a long discussion: http://lists.apple.com/archives/carbon-dev/2005/Dec/msg00475.html – smcbride