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True but there's also things like Sweet.js, and non-s-expression languages have been able to get macros too, such as Elixir. I'm firmly convinced that s-express
by sdegutis 7y ago
True but there's also things like Sweet.js, and non-s-expression languages have been able to get macros too, such as Elixir. I'm firmly convinced that s-expressions are almost pure novelty with no legitimate benefit.
- aeorgnoieang 7y agoI've been programming in Elixir for a few months now, and I like it a lot, but I found your comment amusing because a lot of Elixir's 'macro expressivity' seems to be due to Erlang using a data structure for its own parsing that can be readily manipulated as 'first class citizen' in itself. That's basically what s-expressions do. Apart from a small number of things that most people otherwise encounter in 'infix' notation, e.g. arithmetic, s-expressions seem to be a radically, and brilliantly, simple form of writing programs in a way that makes meta-programming as simple as possible. (And, of course, meta-programming is powerful, thus 'dangerous', but there's a lot of things that are only really feasible with it.)