How about "noncompositional"? This word and its opposite have fairly technical linguistic meanings. A "compositional" phrase (= expression) is one whose meaning can be (correctly) inferred only by knowing the meanings of their parts and the semantic rule associated with the syntax form of the expression. So an expression like "a red apple" means precisely what you would expect if you knew the meaning of "a", "red", and "apple", and knew how to combine a determinative, an adjective, and a noun into a noun phrase.
It's not a perfect match. Single-word anaphor (like "it") wouldn't normally be called noncompositional because there's nothing to compose there---the word just has a complex meaning. And in natural language there's no analogue at all to the more complex things that macros can do. But to the extent that a hygienic macro system tries to make it difficult (or impossible) to write macros that capture values, and a lot of people informally use the term "unhygienic macro" to refer to "macros that hygienic macro systems try to prevent", the core thing that's being prevented is essentially noncompositionality. To turn it around, if I hand you a compositional expression, I also hand you the syntax rule and the values of all evaluable sub-expressions, then you can 100% reliably hand back the value of the overall expression, and this seems to be the core desideratum when people start talking about hygienic macro system. -- -=-Don blaheta-=-dblah...@monm.edu-=-=-<http://www.monmsci.net/~dblaheta/>-=- "The "melting pot" theory works in some areas in the larger cities. The "salad bowl" theory works rather well for other towns and cities. But I propose a third theory that covers vast areas of the US. The "child's plate" theory. In this theory all of the foods are separated into their own groups and if the ketchup touches the green beans all hell breaks loose." --Brian Pyle _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users
