Macros, hard sell [was Re: Excavators [was: A language idea: Elle]]

[Shriram Krishnamurthi <address@hidden>]

Reginald Braithwaite-Lee wrote:

> I also recall a lively discussion around "macros" at LL2. Apparantly,
> many of us feel macros make a language more useful, and yet langauges
> with macros are a hard sell.

Let's consider two prominent languages with macros.

Language    Hard Sell
---------------------
Scheme      yes
C           no

I don't even see a correlation, much less causality.  (I'm
intentionally neglecting languages like Lisp, whose hardness-of-sell
have varied over time.  Likewise, I'm also ignoring first cousins of
macros, such as templates.)

Perhaps you mean that *macros* are a hard sell?

Shriram