Lacking Natural Simplicity

Random musings on books, code, and tabletop games.

Skeptical about Macro Hygiene?

Eli Barzilay has a couple of interesting USENET articles on his experience changing from defmacro to syntax-case. Unfortunately, I didn't understand Shriram Krishnamurthi's comments on hygiene at all.

Additions on Tuesday, 21 April 2009

I thought I'd better quote what he said:

By the way, I've been skeptical about hygiene for the past six or seven years. The hygiene algorithm struck me as such an obviously good idea that I simply couldn't understand what the MIT folks meant when they said (and I'm paraphrasing, loosely, from papers I haven't read in a decade) that the hygiene algorithm doesn't make sense. Only a few years ago did I begin to unravel this, and now I almost entirely understand it. In short, it has taken me nearly a decade to understand why someone did not understand something that I understood obviously, and it's only because what I understood obviously, I now barely understand at all.

It's really simple to understand how to implement defmacro. It's not simple to understand how to implement syntax-case. Throw in modules, as in PLT Scheme (and R6RS, apparently), and things are even more difficult. Throw in the oddity of writing syntax-case/syntax-rules macros with the pattern matching syntax, and you really have to wonder.

I really wish somebody would sit down and write detailed survey article comparing all the Lisp and Scheme macro systems and considering all the interactions with modules and pattern matching. I think it's really needed. [Do I say this somewhere else, too?]

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