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

[Michael Vanier <address@hidden>]

> From: Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk@cs.brown.edu>
> Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 16:48:14 -0500
> 
> 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
> 

How about "structural, programmable, symbol-based macros" vs. "simple
string-replacement macros"?  Or, "good macros" vs. "crappy macros"? ;-)
>From this, it's clear that only good macros are a hard sell; crappy macros
are no problem.

Mike