The Machine That Builds Itself: The Strengths of the Lisp Languages (2016)

Re:The Machine That Builds Itself: The Strengths of the Lisp... by pathsjs on Monday July 02, 2018 @12:13PM (#17442901)

As it turns out, you can have a powerful macro system without s-expr syntax (e.g. Scala, Nim). In any case, you jus need to write functions that operate over trees, which you can do in any language. That this tree is not immediately reflected in the actual syntax is just a minor hindrance

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Re:The Machine That Builds Itself: The Strengths of the Lisp... by KingMob on Monday July 02, 2018 @04:36PM (#17445122)

Personally, I find homoiconicity is key to easy construction of macros, and to do that, you need s-exprs (or something similar).

Without that, it's certainly doable, but the result looks nothing like your non-macro code in that language.

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Re:The Machine That Builds Itself: The Strengths of the Lisp... by yvdriess on Monday July 02, 2018 @01:12PM (#17443482)

Writing non-trivial macros in Scala or Nim will quickly liberate you of this notion.

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Re:The Machine That Builds Itself: The Strengths of the Lisp... by _yawn on Monday July 02, 2018 @02:21PM (#17444159)

What problems do you run into? I'm familiar with lisp's macro system but didn't get to look into hygienic macros in other language, and was wondering if they are equivalent.

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Re:The Machine That Builds Itself: The Strengths of the Lisp... by pathsjs on Monday July 02, 2018 @01:25PM (#17443625)

In fact, I do :-)

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