In computer science, a compiler directive is data embedded in source code by programmers to tell compilers some intention about compilation. A compiler directive often tells the compiler how to compile; other source code tells the compiler what to compile. Wikibooks Wikiversity has more about this subject: School of Computer Science Open Directory Project: Computer Science Downloadable Science and Computer Science books Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies Belief that title science in computer science is inappropriate Categories: | ... A programmer or software developer is someone who programs computers, i. ... A diagram of the operation of a typical multi-language compiler. ...

Examples

• A compiler directive could tell the compiler whether to do range checking on array indexes or trust that the programmer has not written code that can cause an error.
• An #include directive in C tells the compiler to insert another text file at the current point.
• The #pragma once construct in some implementations of C serves a purpose similar to that of #include guards.

In Ada, compiler directives are called pragmas (short for "pragmatic information"). In other languages, such as Turbo Pascal, they are called significant comments. The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a standardized imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Dennis Ritchie for use on the Unix operating system. ... In the C programming language, an #include guard is a particular construct used to avoid the problem of double inclusion when dealing with the #include directive, as demonstrated in the following sample C code: // Double inclusion File grandfather. ... Ada is a structured, statically typed imperative computer programming language designed by a team lead by Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull during 1977–1983. ... Turbo Pascal 3. ...