From: Robert Feldt <feldt@...>
Date: 2002-02-20T18:43:45+09:00
Subject: Re: REBOL vs Ruby

On Wed, 20 Feb 2002, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:

> Maybe it's mostly matter of taste, a man can program in FORTH or Lisp,
> one can even love them.  Yes, I love Lisp.  And FORTH... well.. FORTH
>
This is interesting. What do you think of Lisp-style macros? I've only
used them very briefly but from my understanding they seem very powerful
and can be used to simplify programs (since you can describe your
problem/solution in a language dialect tailored to it) and even make them
more readable. But its a two-edged sword since the language is no longer
"pure"/core so that you (or you-at-a-later-date or your 
followers/maintainers etc) must now understand a new dialect (or whole
new language) to understand what the program does. 

I've been playing with the idea of introducing macros to Ruby (I
guess something in the style of Dylan's hygienic macros or the OOPSLA
2001 paper "Java syntactic extender"). Would you think its counter to
Ruby's philosophy or is it not in Ruby because of
implementation/technical/other reasons?

Regards,

Robert