Re: Why Images Bother People (or, at least me)

[Michael Vanier <address@hidden>]

I read that too.  I wonder if he knows much about lisp macros, or about
other languages (e.g. ocaml with camlp4) that do similar things.  Not that
it's a bad idea, but I suspect he may take credit for stuff he didn't
invent.  I can just see the headlines: "Java revolutionizes programming and
hits the Jackpot(TM) with source-code free approach!"

That said, I wonder how many other languages allow manipulation of parse
trees.  Ocaml does, as I've said, and python does as well (though
crudely).  How does this approach compare to macros?  Is it complementary,
or are they two ways of doing the same thing?  I know that camlp4 is often
used to do things that would be done in lisp using macros.

Mike

> Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2003 08:54:08 -0400
> From: Geoffrey Knauth <geoff@knauth.org>
> 
> I was reading an interview of James Gosling's Jackpot project,
> 
> http://www.artima.com/intv/jackpot.html
> 
> and this statement of his,
> 
> "Our internal notion of the truth is not text. But once it's not text, 
> all of a sudden you can display it in really interesting ways."
> 
> made me think of the LL1 discussion of Squeak vs. Emacs trade-offs.
> 
> Geoffrey
> --
> Geoffrey S. Knauth | http://knauth.org/gsk
>