Re: need for macros (was Re: Icon)

[Matthias Felleisen <address@hidden>]

   And some people prefer not to commingle the functional,
   lambda-calculus part of a language with the parts that
   do side effects.  It seems they believe in the separation
   of Church and state.  :-)  :-)  :-)

   --Guy


And in a way, they are correct. In the end, monads give you two things that
are important: 

 - types that make effects explicit (even though these bishops don't like
   to admit that :)

 - more power in manipulating state (duplicate it, for example) 

I am a pragmatist and want implicit effects and I believe that conventional
imperative power as found in Scheme or ML is enough. The key is to
understand what the problems are with reasoning about the features and
implementation problems that one adds to a language. 

3D macros are in a category by themselves in that regard. 

-- Matthias