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Oh, you want the homoiconicity to serve a purpose. I guess that's reasonable. :) Although, I'd say that a dialect of Lisp with no runtime eval, but with compile

• wruza 7y ago
  But... macro compile time may be seen as just one pass of reading, evaling in almost the same runtime and saving an image for later reuse. If we got these (var st = x), (var y = 1), (function main), etc in column 1 and then just run one pass of js, we would be able to “compile” it, i.e. (exit (save (optimize (eval (read))))), and then run main() with no IfStatement defined. I mean, isn’t compile-time a little vague term when macros are ‘evaluated’ in essentially the same rich environment, and it’s only wanted coincidence that the point separating compile/run time is the same as the execution stage where no macros remain unevaluated? (ed: but still no io performed except for source codes and static resources) When we write say heavily templated and const_expr’ed C++ to output the results of these exprs, do we pretend that we then run a binary or that we ran a C++ program once and cached results in an executable format?
• wruza 7y ago
  (Follow up) the parser returns data structures that are easily manipulated by functions in the standard library But is there a limit on how powerful macro has to be? Think meta-meta-meta programming where a macro constructs a macro for own use somewhat imperatively. Like compile-time for another compile-time for... etc I mean, if we can easily manipulate code at compile-time AND have a macro evaluator at hand, then don’t we have enough time to do something maybe more ambitious than the resulting binary chunk would ever do?