From: "Stephan J. Schmidt" <stephan.schmidt@...>
Date: 2002-02-20T20:31:01+09:00
Subject: Re: REBOL vs Ruby

Hi,

I like macros in lisp which make lisp very powerful and I would like to
see macros in Ruby ;-)

bye
-stephan

On Wed, 2002-02-20 at 10:43, Robert Feldt wrote:
> 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
> 
>