With the CLAMP macro replacing the combination of MIN and MAX, we will
have at least two advantages:
1. It's more obvious semantically.
2. There are no more mixes of confusing uses like MIN(MAX(a,b),c) and
MAX(MIN(a,b),c) and MIN(a,MAX(b,c)) appearing everywhere. We unify
the 'clamping' with a single macro.
Note that the behavior of this CLAMP macro is different from
the combination `MAX(low,MIN(x,high))`.
* This CLAMP macro expands to two comparisons instead of three from
MAX and MIN combination. In theory, this makes the code slightly
smaller, in case that (low) or (high) or both are computed at
runtime, so that compilers cannot optimize them. (The third
comparison will matter if (low)>(high); see below.)
* CLAMP has a side effect, that if (low)>(high) it will produce weird
results. Unlike MIN & MAX which will force either (low) or (high) to
win. No assertion of ((low)<=(high)) is done in this macro, for now.
This CLAMP macro is implemented like described in glib
<http://developer.gnome.org/glib/stable/glib-Standard-Macros.html>
and does not handle weird uses like CLAMP(a++, low++, high--) .
Implementations for Linux (tested) and FreeBSD (still untested, thanks to @etosan for providing the table).
Darwin and OpenBSD(ping @mmcco) builds should be broken now, pending their own tables.
Bernard Spil