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If you've never had the possibility to do so before it's not surprising that you never felt the need to do it. Languages affect your way of thinking and impleme
by simias 12y ago
If you've never had the possibility to do so before it's not surprising that you never felt the need to do it. Languages affect your way of thinking and implementing algorithms.
On the other hand, once you've tried the sweet honey of lisp macros, going back to C macros makes you sad. There's not a week that goes by without me being frustrated at the rudeness of C macros. Not to mention languages that don't offer a macrosystem at all. And the parens thing is a tired meme.
I agree with you for the diamonds though, very distracting.
- Havvy 12y agoThe first macro system I learned was Clojure's. Only once have I used a C style macro, and that was in my assembly class. I noticed the article mentions that some don't like calling syntax extensions macros because of the comparison to Common Lisp macros. To that, I say that's a crazy way of thinking. Macros are necessarily dependent upon the semantics of the language they are for, so anybody who thinks that all macro systems are identical are the people who probably wouldn't go out of their way to learn a language with a non-textual substitution macro system, so changing the name for that purpose seems foolish. On the other hand, syntax-extension or syntax-transformations are a more descriptive term on their own merits. And yeah, the diamonds are silly. Better to just color the word.