Macros and Language Design.

[Matthew Estes <address@hidden>]

	I have been reading this book: 
http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/people/PVR/book.html to learn more about the 
kinds of programming language features people talk about here. First off, 
I'm curious what other people think of this book? So far its been very 
helpful to me in clearing up what some people are talking about, 
particularly on this list.
	They talk about using a "kernel language approach". They have this small 
kernel of language, and then, through a parser generator tool, other 
constructs are added to the language by translating them into the kernel 
language. Is this comparable to what Lisp macros do? A while back, in the 
macros discussion, someone(Paul Graham?) mentioned that macros are useful 
to the language designer even if they are not exposed in the language, is 
this what he was talking about?
	Also, to further my understanding of macros, I have some examples of more 
complex things I think macros could solve. I'm a senior electrical 
engineering student, and we've been doing some VHDL, and for the subset of 
the language we're allowed to use, its rather tedious to write finite state 
machines. So I wrote a program, in C, to take a transition list of the 
Finite State Machine and translate it into VHDL(with usually a 10-20x 
increase in the lines of code from the transition table to the VHDL). A 
friend of mine uses a Java tool called Torque to generate code for his a 
lot of his database work in a project of his. Are these the kinds of things 
the reason Lisp programmers love macros? Are they are replacement for code 
generators, except fully integrated(or not) into the language, so that 
none/fewer of the problems of code generators are encountered? Am I missing 
the point, or anything else for that matter?

							Matt Estes