[racket-dev] syntax taints instead of syntax certificates

A few seconds ago, Eli Barzilay wrote:
> 8 minutes ago, Carl Eastlund wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 9:19 PM, Matthew Flatt <mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:
> > > I've pushed a change to Racket's macro system that throws out the
> > > syntax-certificate system and adds a syntax-taint system.
> > >
> > >
> > > Syntax taints, like syntax certificates before, are intended to
> > > protect macro expansions from abuse. "Abuse" means using
> > > `local-expand' to extract a piece of an expansion, then putting the
> > > piece in a new context or using `datum->syntax' to access unexported
> > > module bindings using the piece's lexical context. Meanwhile,
> > > program-processing tools like `errortrace' or languages like
> > > `typed/racket' are supposed to pull apart expansions and reorganize
> > > them; code inspectors remain the way to distinguish trusted tools and
> > > languages from potential abusers.
> > >
> > > Things you need to know:
> > >
> > >  * When writing a macro (without `syntax-rules', `define-syntax-rule',
> > >   or `syntax-id-rules'), apply `syntax-protect' to the macro's result
> > >   syntax object to protect it from abuse. The `syntax-rules', etc.,
> > >   forms use `syntax-protect' automatically.
> > 
> > Does this mean we should be updating all our old macros now, and
> > adding syntax-protect as boilerplate to (nearly) all of our new
> > macros?  How often is a manual syntax-protect necessary?  It's great
> > to have a system we can reason about, but the nice thing about
> > certificates was that they were invisible most of the time.  It
> > looks like you're suggesting that at least the use of syntax-protect
> > is going to become ubiquitous in this new system.
> 
> That's exactly what I'm worried about too.  (I was going to try things
> out first, but the build crashed.)

An attempt to clarify what's unclear to me: if I'm supposed to almost
always "arm" the result of a transformer, then why not have the
expander do that for me, and add some new thing so in the exceptional
cases I could do

  (define-syntax (foo stx)
    (dont-arm ...blah...))

?  (Apologies if this is explained in the guide section.)


> Actually, the certificate system was good enough at being invisible
> that explaining the new system in terms of it isn't effective (at
> least for me) since certificates were this complicated thing that you
> need to be aware of in some rare cases but 5 minutes after you're done
> you'd re-forget what you read.  (Again, this is all for a subjective
> value of "you", of course.)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!