[racket] Newbie question: Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days - macros

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 1:27 PM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> 6 hours ago, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt wrote:
>>
>> Eli wrote an excellent introduction to Racket macros on
>> comp.lang.scheme recently, which I've encouraged him to post on the
>> Racket blog.
>
> I'm not sure how "excellent" it is, but I posted it now.  Please let
> me know if you see any obvious problems.

It looks like a great macro essay for a certain crowd (altho the essay
seems to insult that selfsame crowd; perhaps you are assuming that
that crowd is into S&M?).

Some comments:

 - I probably would have used #` in the second while macro. Yes, I see
you mention it later, but doing it at that point seems to fit with
what the reader's been given at that point

 - it would be good if you did some kind of a computation at compile
time, preferably to demonstrate an interesting computation one should
want to do at compile time. Maybe a macro that embeds a formatted
source location into its output?

 - cpp macros are, I believe, based on lexemes, not strings (so you
cannot have an unclosed string in a macro or something). At least
nowadays they are.

Robby