Re: [Chicken-users] macro systems and chicken (long)

[John Cowan]

Alex Shinn scripsit:

> DEFINE-MACRO is just EVAL.  Syntactic closures is just EVAL
> with the two extra env parameters, [...].

And as I believe I heard someone say on #scheme the other day, if your
program involves EVAL, it's probably broken.  Even if the EVAL is hidden
behind something else.

Et Alaric Snell-Pym scripsit:

> >In such a case I would write a compiler in Scheme directly,
> >using the run-time facilities rather than macros, and either
> >compile or interpret the result.
> 
> But then it's not seamlessly and lightweightly integrated with the
> rest of your code; it's like the old days of compiling .c and .f
> and .s files into .os then linking them together to achieve multi-
> language programs...

Not really; it's more like adding a user pass to Chicken.

> I'm talking about things like macros that simplify matrix-algebraic
> expressions, unrolling things and using knowledge of matrix
> identities and so on, so you can write matrix arithmetic in a natural
> form yet have it automatically implemented efficiently, that sort of
> thing.

That's the sort of thing a front-end can do excellently, just by passing
on anything it doesn't recognize, like the pic | eqn | tbl | troff
pipeline.

-- 
John Cowan <address@hidden>             http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
It's like if you meet an really old, really rich guy covered in liver
spots and breathing with an oxygen tank, and you say, "I want to be
rich, too, so I'm going to start walking with a cane and I'm going to
act crotchety and I'm going to get liver disease. --Wil Shipley