Re: Libraries and repositories

[Paul Graham <address@hidden>]

No, I don't like hygienic macros.  I don't know what
percentage of the macros in On Lisp could not be done 
with them-- my gripe is that they're not Lisplike.

The core idea of Lisp is that code is made out of 
lists.  What could be purer and simpler than writing
macros as functions that return lists?  Hygienic macros
do do this underneath, but they won't let me do it;
they're like the Supreme Court reading a book to
decide if I should be allowed to.  It's like programming
in Pascal.

I don't mind if some form of hygienic macros are 
provided as a library.  There might be classes of macros
that were simpler to express that way.  I just don't 
want to be kept from doing myself what they do.


--- Michael Vanier <mvanier@bbb.caltech.edu> wrote:
> > Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 15:17:50 -0800 (PST)
> > From: Paul Graham <paulgraham@yahoo.com>
> > Cc: ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> > Sender: owner-ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu
> > Precedence: bulk
> > 
> > Much as I would want to agree with an argument that praises
> > Scheme and disses Java, I suspect that the real problem is
> > that Scheme is (currently) ruled by a committee and Java
> > isn't.  If the Scheme committee got together and blessed a
> > huge collection of libraries as an official part of the 
> > next version of the language, they would soon come included
> > with anything that dared to call itself Scheme.  They're
> > not likely to, though; look how long they dithered about
> > macros, and what they ended up with.
> 
> You don't like define-syntax, syntax-rules, syntax-case et. al.? 
> They seem
> very elegant and useful to me.  I don't think there's anything in the
> standard prohibiting defmacro-style macros, and most schemes seem to
> offer
> them. 
> 
> How many of the examples in On Lisp would be impossible to do with
> scheme's
> "official" macros?  Is it because they're hygienic?
> 
> 
> > The wind has shifted.  Languages have more in them, and change
> > faster, than you can do with a committee.
> > 
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> Mike
> 


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