4 ms·
> I’ve never really understood what “homoiconic” is supposed to mean. The author gives a great candidate definition but doesn’t want us to call it homoiconicit
by fakegalitarian 7y ago
> I’ve never really understood what “homoiconic” is supposed to mean.
The author gives a great candidate definition but doesn’t want us to call it homoiconicity for some reason
> What’s this intermediate syntax tree? It’s an almost entirely superficial understanding of your program: it basically does paren-matching to create a tree representing the surface nesting structure of the text. This is nowhere near an AST, but it’s just enough for the macro expansion system to do its job.
I was taught that macro expansion is just another AST transformation, and homoiconicity makes this easy because the syntax tree can be transformed without understanding the grammar.
But I guess this whole article is an exercise in un-defining things.
Also, (2012).