Re: changing the macro expander

On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 02:52:24PM +0000, Matthias Radestock wrote:
> "Scott G. Miller" <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> > On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 06:58:07AM +0000, Matthias Radestock wrote:
> >> 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.
> >
> > That should be easy.  Just load the new expander period, and call 
> > its syntax expansion function to test.  Maybe redefine some of the basic
> > SISC core functions like load to call it with an alternate name 
> > (new-load) for example.  That should get us close enough.
> 
> Is it really that simple? I am asking because I was under the impression
> that one reason we have been stuck with an ancient psyntax for years is
> that there was no easy way of incrementally debugging it. Instead we
> would hack on the source, expand it, put the result in place of the
> existing psyntax, fire up a heap build and then try to decipher the
> completely unintelligible error messages that resulted. At least that is
> what I did.
> 
Well we had the problem that psyntax required a lot of hooks, including 
eval, to operate.  That may or may not be true of another 
implementation.

	Scott

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