From: Sean O'Dell <sean@...>
Date: 2004-08-06T01:38:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Macros in Ruby

On Monday 02 August 2004 02:16, George Moschovitis wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> one of the features of the LISP family of languages that is missing from
> Ruby are macros. I think they are useful on a lot of occasions so
> I would like to see Ruby support macros in the future.

I have to say that, for me, Ruby procs work just fine in place of macros, 
except if I could change one thing, it would be this:

The ability to modify the binding in which procs run.

Sometimes I really wish I could make a call in a method or class definition, 
and have that proc run in the context where I call it, instead of where it's 
defined.  Like so:

module ModOne
  @var = "one"

  TestProc = Proc.new do
    @var
  end
end

module ModTwo
  @var = "two"

  ModOne::TestProc.call  #=> "two"
end

...perhaps making a new class named "Macro" which is essentially Proc, but 
which executes in the current binding instead of the binding where it was 
created.

	Sean O'Dell