Douglas Alan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > And likewise, good macro programming can solve some problems that no > amount of linting could ever solve.
I think Lisp is more needful of macros than other languages, because its underlying primitives are too, well, primitive. You have to write all the abstractions yourself. Python has built-in abstractions for a few container types like lists and dicts, and now a new and more general one (iterators), so it's the next level up. Haskell abstracts the concept of containers to something called monads, so operations like loops and list comprehensions fall out automatically (it took me a while to realize that--Haskell listcomps weren't a bright new idea someone thought of adding to an otherwise complete language: they were already inherently present in the list monad operations and their current syntax is just minor sugaring and is actually restricted on purpose to make the error messages less confusing). So, a bunch of stuff one needs macros to do conveniently in Lisp, can be done with Python's built-in syntax. And a bunch of stuff that Python could use macros for, are easily done in Haskell using delayed evaluation and monads. And Haskell is starting to grow its own macro system (templates) but that's probably a sign that an even higher level language (maybe with dependent types or something) would make the templates unnecessary. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
