What's better about Ruby than Python?

[Dave Kuhlman]

Andrew Dalke wrote:

[snip]
> 
> The complaint about macros has been their tendency to
> increase a single person's abilities at the cost of overall
> loss in group understanding.  I've heard references to
> projects where that didn't occur, but am not swayed
> by it because those seem staffed by people with
> extraordinarily good programming skills almost never
> found amoung the chemists and biologists I work with.

I just took a quick look at the "Revised5 Report on the
Algorithmic Language Scheme".  Macros in Scheme5 are called
"hygienic macros", so apparently there are some dirty macros that
we should worry about.  My understanding is that macros came to
Scheme slowly, with resistence, with a good deal of thought, and
with restrictions.

     "More recently, Scheme became the first programming language
     to support hygienic macros, which permit the syntax of a
     block-structured language to be extended in a consistent and
     reliable manner."

See:

    http://www.schemers.org/Documents/Standards/R5RS/HTML/
   
http://www.schemers.org/Documents/Standards/R5RS/HTML/r5rs-Z-H-3.html
   
http://www.schemers.org/Documents/Standards/R5RS/HTML/r5rs-Z-H-7.html#%_sec_4.3

I have the same worry that some others on this thread have
expressed, that a macro capability in Python would enable others
to write code that I would not be able to read or to figure out.

[snip]

Dave

-- 
Dave Kuhlman
http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman
dkuhlman at rexx.com