Skip to content

Comment on Lisper's take on Arcparent

Comments

That's kinda the right idea. There are two problems with your specific proposal: 1) it places a considerable burden on the programmer to annotate every invocation of a top-level function. For complex macros that can become quite annoying. 2) Baking the concept of a single top-level into the macro system makes it hard to add modules later.

If you pursue the idea of having the system walk the code and automatically insert those annotations you will (almost certainly) end up re-inventing hygienic macros.

(For the record, I much prefer the Lisp2 solution, because it's the hacker's solution. It's not mathematically elegant, but it's simple (compared to hygiene) and it gets the job done.)

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.