merits of Lisp vs Python

[greg]

Jon Harrop wrote:

> Outside Lisp, macros are for syntax. Evaluation semantics (e.g. lazy
> evaluation) then have nothing to do with macros.

I don't think that's entirely true. With currying
and lazy evaluation, there's a sense in which
Haskell function definitions already *are* macros.

There are limits to the degree of syntactical
transformation you can reasonably achieve -- it
wouldn't be easy to make Haskell code look exactly
like Cobol, for example. But usually that's not
what you're after -- rather you just want to
devise some way to express your intent with a
minimum of boilerplate.

I once implemented a parser in HUGS. Using nothing
but built-in language features, I was able to
construct a system whereby I could more or less
just write down the BNF grammar rules and feed them
straight into the HUGS compiler. Achieving a
similar trick in Lisp would probably have required
using macros.

--
Greg