While writing my own debugging lib, an idea I was toying with was having a debug macro look like one of the built-in @ compiler directives, e.g. @selector, @encode, etc.

Since macro names must be identifiers, and identifiers can’t have @s in them. You can’t do this:

#define @debug(fmt, ...) \
  NSLog(fmt, ##__VA_ARGS__)

The trick, we’ll write our macro such that the macro definition will be missing an @ prefix. When the definition expands, the @ before the real identifier will make our code valid.

#define debug(fmt, ...) \
  try {} @finally {} \
  NSLog(fmt, ##__VA_ARGS__)

Here, the try in the macro is missing its @ prefix. So before and after the preprocessor does its job, we have:

// before
@debug(@"My name is Travis.")

// after
@try {} @finally {}
NSLog(@"My name is Travis.");

Neat. It’s possible you could clash with directives that are added in the future, so namespacing your macros is probably best (e.g. TRVSDebug), especially in shared libraries. However, I have seen this techniqued used in libextobjc — providing macros such as @weakify and @strongify.