Fear and loathing of the "perification" of Smalltalk

Jason Johnson jason.johnson.081 at gmail.com
Thu Sep 13 17:15:07 UTC 2007


On 9/13/07, Damien Pollet <damien.pollet at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The metaprogramming job of macros is already done by the tools:
> browser, refactorings, etc
>
> Macros in Lisp use the same syntax as functions. When you look at a
> Lisp expression, you can't know which evaluation rules apply without
> looking at the library. Some s-exprs are syntax, evaluated at
> compile-time, some other are calls evaluated at runtime. It works in
> the Lisp realm, but it doesn't fit in Smalltalk.

That's not necessarily the case.  In Smalltalk the macros can be made
to stand out (e.g. ##("macro") ).  And the big thing I see that would
be nice to have macros is for language extentions.  Instead of having
this surprising { } syntax extension we could have #{ } and the
convention that # is the place you put language extensions.



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