Invoking return through a function?

[Rustom Mody]

On Tuesday, October 31, 2017 at 11:05:30 AM UTC+5:30, Steve D'Aprano wrote:
> On Tue, 31 Oct 2017 02:26 pm, Rustom Mody wrote:
> 
> > My own feeling about lisp-macros is conflicted:
> > - They are likely the most unique feature of lisp, putting it at the top of
> > the blub-language tower
> > - They are the single reason Lisp can never succeed like mainstream
> > languages: Any significant Lisp sub-ecosystem will inevitably develop a
> > macro set which succinctly and precisely expresses its needs but is arcane
> > and incomprehensible to someone from another sub-ecosystem.
> 
> Well said. That's one of the disadvantages of Forth as well: since Forth
> allows you to define your own control-structures, even the structure of the
> code can be unfamiliar.
> 
> Another way to put it might be that any sufficiently complex Lisp program
> doesn't look like Lisp any more.

It seems we agree on the facts but not the accounting

Facts: A fixed syntax language (C, Java, Python etc) is likely to have
similar looking programs across a wide spectrum of applications as compared to
a syntax-definable-at-runtime language like Lisp

Accounting: You seem to count this as advantage to fixed-syntax?

Note that if you carry this principle all the way, any application whatever 
running on an x86 will be running x86 instructions; which look more uniform than 
the diverse hl-languages  that produced them.



> 
> Except perhaps for the myriad parentheses *wink* 

Not so: reader-macros can change lisp all the way to the lexical level
And used to do things like html-templating, sql-embedding etc