Re: dylan revival

[Rob Myers <address@hidden>]

On Thursday, April 11, 2002, at 04:30 AM, Bruce Hoult wrote:

> I don't see how Dylan macros are a problem.
> ...
> Maybe the implementation is complex.

I think infix macros take at least 3 times as much code to implement as 
prefix macros. This figure comes from an old posting, I've never 
implemented a macro system. :-)

> it'd be a pretty small
> effort to modify d2c to dump out demacrofied Dylan source code that
> could be fed in to this hypothetical new compiler.

I'd love to use Dylan for scripting instead af Python or AppleScript, 
but the fact that I can't share macro code between d2c and marlais stops 
this (I want to use the XML system, which uses macros to define new tags 
IIRC). A macro preprocessor would be good, but how would macros be 
exported? With a system that compiles all its code at script load time 
this would work, but it would make a listener very slow if it had to 
expand macros by preprocessing.

- Rob.