Re: changing the macro expander

"Scott G. Miller" <[email protected]> writes:

> Its not as bad as it seems.  Annotations are the one feature we do rely 
> heavily on psyntax for.  The expression syntax was introduced to handle 
> various problems with redefinition.  I'm more concerned with breaking 
> compatibility in the module system.

How do we even get to the point where a new expander has been installed?
It better not involve pre-expanding the expander code, loading it during
heap build and seeing what breaks. I've done that with some psyntax
tweaks a few times and it is no fun. Tracking down errors in expanded code
loaded during such an early stage of the heap build - when none of the
nice error reporting is in place - is a nightmare, and the whole cycle
is very time consuming.

I think we somehow have to find a way of doing our expander debugging in
a fully-fledged REPL, with nice error reporting and short
round-trips. The same goes for fixing incompatibilities in the module
system.



Matthias

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security?
Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier
Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo
http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642