I assume it's good for inner scope variable declaration and for using breaks (instead of gotos.)
It's the only construct in C that you can use to #define
a multistatement operation, put a semicolon after, and still use within an if
statement. An example might help:
#define FOO(x) foo(x); bar(x)
if (condition)
FOO(x);
else // syntax error here
...;
Even using braces doesn't help:
#define FOO(x) { foo(x); bar(x); }
Using this in an if
statement would require that you omit the semicolon, which is counterintuitive:
if (condition)
FOO(x)
else
...
If you define FOO like this:
#define FOO(x) do { foo(x); bar(x); } while (0)
then the following is syntactically correct:
if (condition)
FOO(x);
else
....
It is a way to simplify error checking and avoid deep nested if's. For example:
do {
// do something
if (error) {
break;
}
// do something else
if (error) {
break;
}
// etc..
} while (0);