Re: Honu: Syntactic Extension for Algebraic Notation through Enforestation
mikel evins <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.lang.dylan.gwydion.devel |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Mar 18, 2013, at 10:50 PM, Bruce Hoult <[email protected]> wrote: > Providing powerful macros in Dylan purely through pattern matching is > I think a failed experiment. It's often possible to come up with > something that works, but the chances are that no one else will ever > understand it (including yourself later). > > At the same time, building things using quasi-quote in Lisp is a bit > low-level, especially the use of gensym. > > This does seem to occupy a nice place in the middle, with simple > things doable via hygienic templates and more complex things using > normal code written in the language itself. The Scheme community has developed pattern-matching hygienic macros that undeniably work, and I think they're at least reasonably understandable. They're pretty hairy to implement, though, and they add quite a bit of cognitive load to the language. Granting that defmacro is pretty low-level, and that it has its own issues, still, it offers a lot of flexibility and power in return for very modest cost in terms of implementation and understanding. I'm not sure that any replacement proposed so far is a net improvement. _______________________________________________ hackers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.opendylan.org/mailman/listinfo/hackers