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Re:Just what does “code as data” mean anyway? (2014) by yetanotheruser on Friday February 16, 2018 @10:00AM (#16392754)
I'm still wrapping my head around macros, but I have been able to come up with a couple use cases that I quickly realized were already covered by existing macros, the most recent one being a less flexible -> macro.

Anyways, I kept reading places that lisp macros and c macros were completely distinct, which seems untrue after a couple years of trying clojure.

Re:Just what does “code as data” mean anyway? (2014) by kbp on Friday February 16, 2018 @11:22AM (#16393410)
> I kept reading places that lisp macros and c macros were completely distinct, which seems untrue after a couple years of trying clojure.

They're similar in that they're both compile-time functions that generate code, but they're very different in practice, because C macros are written in a text substitution language that knows virtually nothing about C, which naturally makes writing even simple macros very error-prone. Lisp macros, on the other hand, are written in plain old Lisp and receive regular Lisp data structures that you can use the whole language to operate on.

A lot of people learn from C that macros are very difficult to get right, so it's important when they move to Lisp that they give them a second look, because Lisp is a much more capable language for code transformation than cpp.

Re:Just what does “code as data” mean anyway? (2014) by yetanotheruser on Friday February 16, 2018 @01:53PM (#16394793)
Right, that makes sense
Re:Just what does “code as data” mean anyway? (2014) by flavio81 on Friday February 16, 2018 @11:14AM (#16393353)
>Anyways, I kept reading places that lisp macros and c macros were completely distinct, which seems untrue after a couple years of trying clojure.

I haven't used Clojure macros but as a programmer that uses both C and Common Lisp, I can say with good authority that C macros and CL macros are very different.

Re:Just what does “code as data” mean anyway? (2014) by yetanotheruser on Friday February 16, 2018 @06:44PM (#16397662)
Yea, not the same. Similar motivations though, right?