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You pointed out one could achieve much the same result as the aif macro by using cond. I wanted to point out that cond itself is an example of the power of mac
by brlewis 19y ago
You pointed out one could achieve much the same result as the aif macro by using cond. I wanted to point out that cond itself is an example of the power of macros.
- edw 19y agoMy point was more than one isn't usually missing much by being limited to writing hygienic macros. I don't think anyone is disputing the power of macros; it's the power/cost of hygiene violation that people are discussing. Someone could give a "trust the programmer" argument for making unhygienic macros available in a language, but that nostrum is problematic because there are two programmers: the macro writer and the macro user. It's harder than you think to write a macro using DEFMACRO that always behaves the way a user might expect it to behave, and as a user of a macro, you need to wonder how hard the macro writer worked to protect you -- something that I don't like as a fan of black boxes.