I've been reconstructing an old programming language. It originally had a very simple but awkward macro facility: if an identifier was declared as a macro, whenever it was called, it could inspect/consume as much of the remaining tokens as it wished and could splice other tokens in. On top of this a very nice "declarative" macro system was built, which I loved when I used it. Since my implementation is not yet self-hosting, I've been using higher-order functions instead, and the more I do this the less I want macros.
You could think of the rewrite rules in VisualWorks as something resembling macros. Come to think of it, Lukas Renggli, Helvetia, ... found it! http://scg.unibe.ch/archive/phd/renggli-phd.pdf On 12 June 2018 at 12:10, Michael Forster <m...@forsterfamily.ca> wrote: > On Fri, May 25, 2018 at 10:12 AM, Ben Coman <b...@openinworld.com> wrote: > > > > > > On 25 May 2018 at 21:22, Debiller 777 <ozovozovozo...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> > >> Well, I've already asked about adding new literals to pharo or Smalltalk > >> in general, however this time I have a better idea: > >> macros. Can they be added? Because if I understand correctly they may be > >> the only way to do that. > > > > > > Can you provide an example how how you would use a macro? > > > > cheers -ben > > > > Late to the party, but I thought some might find it interesting to > look through the "macros vs. blocks" thread on the old Lightweight > Languages mailing list. Posts from Guy Steele Jr., Avi Bryant, Trevor > Blackwell (rewrote Graham's Yahoo Store in Smalltalk), and others: > > https://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg02060.html > > > Cheers, > > Mike > >
