[racket] Survey of Syntax and Hygienic Macro Systems?

John,

I know this isn't the survey you asked for, but rather one data point in such a survey; nevertheless, I hope it's interesting.  Have a look at OCaml's Camlp4: a macro language where people sometimes *actually* use the AST to write transformations (sometimes quotations just won't cut it).  As somebody who has tried to use camlp4 before, I can understand the attraction of sexp syntax for the language; the OCaml analog of quasiquote is *much* more complicated, as is the pattern matching on syntax, as is....

Will

On Sep 21, 2010, at 12:35 PM, John Clements wrote:

> Me: what are you interested in?
> 
> Student: wouldn't it be cool if you could specify source-to-source translations for languages like c++ by defining the operations at the AST level, after they're parsed?
> 
> Me: AST level <=> s-expressions. Everyone who tries this eventually decides that it's easier to simply write their programs in the AST language (a.k.a. s-expressions). 
> 
> So here's my question: is there a good *survey* of syntax & hygienic macro systems that tries to provide some insight into what we've learned?  I don't think PLAI or 2nd edition EoPL try to do this.
> 
> John
> 
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