On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Dmitry Maluka <dmitrymal...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 03:47:46AM +0000, Aled Gest wrote: >> I totally agree that the C pre-processor sucks. It's ill thought out >> and needs replacing. > > Any proposals?
You don't need to replace something that is useless and evil, as Go shows. Just like Plan 9 didn't "replace" root and suid (or at least not directly). The C preprocessor has been pretty much ignored by any decent C programmer for decades now, getting rid of it in Go is a non-issue. uriel > >> However, going back to what you were saying about >> you being able to subdue Lisp's syntax with macros, any language that >> requires macros to hide its syntax is poorly designed. > > Please don't say a language is poorly designed if you don't know that > language. > >> Macros are there to aid programming. > > They are so in Lisp. > >> You shouldn't need to create a new language >> out of macros to get the job done, otherwise you might as well just >> use another language in the first place. > > The problem is that no language can anticipate any your need. And then > you are forced to go and write ugly C macros or something similar. > >> Are you denying that Lisp's primary concept is that it treats >> everything as a list? > > Yes. Bad books on programming treat Lisp as a "functional programming > language with list as the only data structure" but it isn't. > > Its primary concept is the transparency of the program's abstract > syntax tree (due to the syntax simplicity). > >
