Newsgroups: comp.lang.dylan
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From: davis@ilog.fr (Harley Davis)
Subject: Re: Dylan macro facility (or lack of it)
In-Reply-To: kab@cambridge.apple.com's message of 23 Feb 1995 00:49:34 -0500
Message-ID: <DAVIS.95Feb27174410@passy.ilog.fr>
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References: <9502230536.AA06403@cambridge.apple.com>
Date: 27 Feb 1995 16:44:09 GMT


In article <9502230536.AA06403@cambridge.apple.com> kab@cambridge.apple.com (Kim Barrett) writes:

   > It also appears that you have to mention statically all the syntactic
   > constituents that the macro will be playing with.  One of the cool
   > things you can do with Common Lisp macros is analyze a macro call in
   > order to figure out what needs to go where.  SETF, for example.  Does
   > the Dylan macro facility have some way of doing that?

   Not yet.  We're still working on "procedural" macros.  The
   difficulty is in specifying compile time execution in such a way
   that it is both useful and does not blow away the separation of
   development environment and runtime environment.

Don't allow a macro to be used in the same module in which it is
defined.  It works fine, and it's easy to implement.  Additionally, of
course, you have to separate a module's compilation dependencies from
its execution dependencies.  This approach, which we use in Ilog Talk,
is explained in our LFP '94 paper "Talking about Modules and
Deliveries", available on our WWW server <URL:http://www.ilog.com/>
under the Talk pages.

Are there any alternatives under consideration which are substantially
different from this?  (I would consider having a separate "syntax"
section in a module, as EuLisp does, to be substantially the same, if
it has its own dependencies.)

-- Harley Davis
-- 

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