Hygienic macros (was: do...until wisdom needed...)

[Cameron Laird]

In article <lc66g2edaf.fsf at gaffa.mit.edu>,
Douglas Alan  <nessus at mit.edu> wrote:
			.
			.
			.
>Kind of.  Except God is in the details.  Tcl is slow and its semantics
>are messy.  None of this applies to hygienic procedural macros.
>Hygiene keeps the semantics clean, the macros run at compile-time --
>not at run-time, and the code that is being treated as data has
>structure -- it's not just a string.  Also, procedural macros are
>designed to be used sparingly, not for everything.
>
>|>oug

While I shan't quibble about several details on which
I think reasonable people can disagree, I do think it's
important to combat the misconception that idiomatic
Tcl is rife with mysterious macro-like things.  This is
NOT true, although it's widely-enough believed to have
inspired a comp.lang.tcl thread just this morning.  Yes,
there have been times when procedural macros became
unjustifiably fashionable in Tcl.  We're past that now.
-- 

Cameron Laird <claird at NeoSoft.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html