[racket] letoverlambda

From: Philippe Meunier (meunier at ccs.neu.edu)
Date: Wed Nov 24 00:05:48 EST 2010

Eli Barzilay wrote:
>It's more than that -- the "theoretically advanced ... but" that he
>uses shows off that he really considers the CL macros to be more
>advanced.

That's because he apparently only knows about syntax-rule and not
syntax-case.  Look for the word "hygienic" in chapter 3 of his book:
http://letoverlambda.com/index.cl/guest/chap3.html

"It is no wonder that the Scheme designers have experimented with
so-called hygienic macro systems to avoid having to type gensym all
over the place. The wrong turn that Scheme took was to promote a
domain specific language for the purpose of macro construction. While
Scheme's mini-language is undeniably powerful, it misses the entire
point of macros: macros are great because they are written in lisp,
not some dumbed down pre-processor language."

(See also http://lists.ccs.neu.edu/pipermail/prl/2009q3/002307.html
this discussion already happened a year ago on another public mailing
list not far from this one)

Philippe




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