[racket] macro help redux

It does, but I'm confused. Does that mean that any macro I define that
includes something like a contract has to require every predicate it
could conceivably want? How do I define a macro that will allow me to
specify a predicate later, maybe even one that didn't exist when I
wrote the macro? Or is that not possible?

Or, and this kind of makes sense as I'm writing it, is there a way to
tell a macro to wait to evaluate something in the location it's used,
rather than in its own scope?

Todd

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 5:57 PM, Ryan Culpepper <ryanc at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> Todd O'Bryan wrote:
>>
>> I feel like I'm getting there, but macros still do things that confuse me.
>>
>> According to the Macro Stepper, I've written a macro that expands to:
>>
>> (module fields racket
>>  (#%module-begin
>>   (require "tables.rkt")
>>   (require "../date-utils.rkt")
>>   (begin
>>     (define-struct
>>      date-field
>>      (contract)
>>      #:transparent)
>>     (define (create-date-field
>>              #:contract
>>              (contract db-date?))
>>       (make-date-field contract))
>>     (provide/contract
>>      (create-date-field
>>       (-> #:contract any/c date-field?))))))
>>
>> At the next step of the expansion, I get the error:
>>
>> expand: unbound identifier in module
>> db-date?
>>
>> The only problem is that "../date-utils.rkt" provides db-date? and if
>> I put everything inside the #%module-begin into its own DrRacket
>> definitions window, it runs without error. For some reason, db-date?
>> isn't available when it's needed, but I can't figure out how to make
>> it available.
>>
>> What am I doing wrong?
>
> Is your macro defined in "tables.rkt"? If that's the case, it doesn't matter
> whether the module where it's *used* imports date-utils, but whether the
> module where the macro is *defined* imports date-utils. That's the idea of
> hygienic macros; they're lexically scoped.
>
> You can use the macro stepper to check an identifier's binding by clicking
> on the identifier (here, the reference to 'db-date?'), then opening the
> "Syntax properties" pane using the Stepper window. It'll tell you what
> bindings, if any, the identifier refers to.
>
> Did that help?
>
> Ryan
>
>