John, I know this isn't the survey you asked for, but rather one data point in such a survey; nevertheless, I hope it's interesting. Have a look at OCaml's Camlp4: a macro language where people sometimes *actually* use the AST to write transformations (sometimes quotations just won't cut it). As somebody who has tried to use camlp4 before, I can understand the attraction of sexp syntax for the language; the OCaml analog of quasiquote is *much* more complicated, as is the pattern matching on syntax, as is....
Will On Sep 21, 2010, at 12:35 PM, John Clements wrote: > Me: what are you interested in? > > Student: wouldn't it be cool if you could specify source-to-source > translations for languages like c++ by defining the operations at the AST > level, after they're parsed? > > Me: AST level <=> s-expressions. Everyone who tries this eventually decides > that it's easier to simply write their programs in the AST language (a.k.a. > s-expressions). > > So here's my question: is there a good *survey* of syntax & hygienic macro > systems that tries to provide some insight into what we've learned? I don't > think PLAI or 2nd edition EoPL try to do this. > > John > > _________________________________________________ > For list-related administrative tasks: > http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users
