<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 10:03 PM, Eli Barzilay <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:eli@barzilay.org">eli@barzilay.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> <div class="im">10 minutes ago, Markku Rontu wrote:<br> > On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 6:23 PM, Eli Barzilay <<a href="mailto:eli@barzilay.org">eli@barzilay.org</a>> wrote:<br> </div><div class="im">> > No, it's broken in pretty much all cases. Give me a single<br> > > symbolic macro and I'll show you how it's broken. (And point out<br> > > how CL bypasses the problem...)<br> > ><br> > I think it's a bit disingenuous to say they are broken. People made<br> > successful systems using their simple but broken tools, yes? People<br> > are making successful systems in crippled languages such as Java and<br> > CL. And some people even like it :-) Sure they can only build a<br> > limited thing with the broken tool, but if you stay within its<br> > limits it doesn't matter, does it? Nobody is trying to implement<br> > Typed Clojure on top of the macro system, I hope :-)<br> <br> </div>Sure, if you take the TM-equivalent path then nothing is broken, of<br> course... (That path tends to melt away all of PL into a weak *puff*<br> of irrelevance...)<br> <div class="im"><br></div></blockquote><div>I mean exactly this sense of disingenuousness when you use the word broken for something that people use successfully despite its warts. That it is a weak *puff* of irrelevance of a word :-) Lead from the front, show superior tools by showing superior results!<br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="im"> <br> > But as syntactic sugar for a DSL, where's the big problem that makes<br> > it entirely broken?<br> <br> </div>Actually, unhygienic macros break even more glaringly for many DSLs.<br></blockquote><div><br>Which I guess is why they tend to be recommended as only syntactic sugar on top of a plain old functional library?<br><br> -Markku<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> <font color="#888888"><br> --<br> </font><div><div></div><div class="h5"> ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) Eli Barzilay:<br> <a href="http://barzilay.org/" target="_blank">http://barzilay.org/</a> Maze is Life!<br> </div></div></blockquote></div><br>