In computer programming, a directive or pragma (from "pragmatic") is a language construct that specifies how a compiler (or other translator) should process its input. Depending on the programming language, directives may or may not be part of the grammar of the language and may vary from compiler to compiler. They can be processed by a preprocessor to specify compiler behavior, or function as a form of in-band parameterization.
In some cases directives specify global behavior, while in other cases they only affect a local section, such as a block of programming code. In some cases, such as some C programs, directives are optional compiler hints and may be ignored, but normally they are prescriptive and must be followed. However, a directive does not perform any action in the language itself, but rather only a change in the behavior of the compiler.
This term could be used to refer to proprietary third-party tags and commands (or markup) embedded in code that result in additional executable processing that extend the existing compiler, assembler and language constructs present in the development environment. The term "directive" is also applied in a variety of ways that are similar to the term command.
See main article: C preprocessor.
In C and C++, the language supports a simple macro preprocessor. Source lines that should be handled by the preprocessor, such as #define and #include are referred to as preprocessor directives.
Syntactic constructs similar to C's preprocessor directives, such as C#'s #if, are also typically called "directives", although in these cases there may not be any real preprocessing phase involved.
All preprocessor commands begin with a hash symbol (#) with the exception of the import and module directives in C++.[1]
COBOL Had a COPY directive.
In ALGOL 68, directives are known as pragmats (from "pragmatic"), and denoted pragmat or pr; in newer languages, notably C, this has been abbreviated to "pragma" (no 't').
A common use of pragmats in ALGOL 68 is in specifying a stropping regime, meaning "how keywords are indicated". Various such directives follow, specifying the POINT, UPPER, RES (reserved), or quote regimes. Note the use of stropping for the pragmat keyword itself (abbreviated pr), either in the POINT or quote regimes: .PR POINT .PR .PR UPPER .PR .PR RES .PR 'pr' quote 'pr'
Today directives are best known in the C language, of early 1970s vintage, and continued through the current C99 standard, where they are either instructions to the C preprocessor, or, in the form of #pragma, directives to the compiler itself. They are also used to some degree in more modern languages; see below.
declare construct (also proclaim or declaim). With one exception, declarations are optional, and do not affect the semantics of the program. The one exception is special, which must be specified where appropriate.#include "file" directive is the significant comment {$I "file"}.[http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/use.html use]", which imports modules, can also be used to specify directives, such as use strict; or use utf8;.{-# INLINE foo #-}.[3]declare(strict_types=1).from __future__ import feature (defined in PEP 236 -- Back to the __future__), which changes language features (and uses the existing module import syntax, as in Perl), and the coding directive (in a comment) to specify the encoding of a source code file (defined in PEP 263 -- Defining Python Source Code Encodings). A more general directive statement was proposed and rejected in PEP 244 -- The `directive' statement; these all date to 2001.use syntax for directives, with the difference that pragmas are declared as string literals (e.g. "use strict";, or "use asm";), rather than a function call.Option" is used for directives:Option Explicit On|Off - When on disallows implicit declaration of variables at first use requiring explicit declaration beforehand.Option Compare Binary - Results in string comparisons based on a sort order derived from the internal binary representations of the characters - e.g. for the English/European code page (ANSI 1252) A < B < E < Z < a < b < e < z < À < Ê < Ø < à < ê < ø. Affects intrinsic operators (e.g. =, <>, <, >), the Select Case block, and VB runtime library string functions (e.g. InStr).Option Compare Text - Results in string comparisons based on a case-insensitive text sort order determined by your system's locale - e.g. for the English/European code page (ANSI 1252) (A=a) < (À = à) < (B=b) < (E=e) < (Ê = ê) < (Z=z) < (Ø = ø). Affects intrinsic operators (e.g. =, <>, <, >), the Select Case block, and VB runtime library string functions (e.g. InStr).Option Strict On|Off - When on disallows:Option Infer On|Off - When on enables the compiler to infer the type of local variables from their initializers.key: value notation. For example, coding: UTF-8 indicates that the file is encoded via the UTF-8 character encoding..END, which might direct the assembler to stop assembling code.