Re: choosing a language for your audience or macros vs syntax?

[Daniel Weinreb <address@hidden>]

Jonathan Bachrach wrote:

>matthias,
>
>i* never said that having a lightweight lambda notation _eliminates_
>the need for syntactic abstraction.  i said instead that macros become
>less necessary.  i said that many of the common** uses of macros can
>be conveniently expressed in this lightweight lambda notation (e.g.,
>smalltalk's blocks) without resorting to macros. 
>
That is my experience as well.  The vast majority of Lisp macros that I 
ever wrote could
(and therefore should) have been done without using macros had there 
been available
the proper lambda stuff (lexical scoping, "funargs", and so on).  Macros 
would still
have been very useful and important but they would have been used far 
less often,
only in cases where something more profound was going on than with-open-file
or define-zmacs-command or dotimes.  So I think you were both agreeing; 
there
was just a small miscommunication.