Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

[Andrew Dalke]

(I really am trying to stop posting to this thread.  Really I am.)

Erann Gat:
> If you have no ambitions beyond writing
> yet-another-standard-web-app then macros are not for you.  But if your
> goals run grander than that then the extra leverage that you get from
> things like macros becomes very precious indeed.

Fiddlesticks.  My ambitions are to help people understand biology
and chemistry by making tools to assist in managing the huge amount
of data and algorithms available in the computational life sciences.
Potentially helping find-cures-for-cancer type research.  The fact
that the algorithms involved in doing so are in almost all cases
easily solved with functions instead of macros doesn't make them
nor me ambitionless.

And in those very rare cases where I need code generation,
I can emit the code and compile it into C, or built my own parse
tree in Python and generate byte code, or exec a string.  They
are almost invariably part of a compute kernel which can be
treated a black box.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com