From: itsme213@... (you CAN teach an old dog ...)
Date: 2003-06-17T08:59:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Reason for implicit block syntax ?

ts <decoux@moulon.inra.fr> wrote 
> y>   http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-121.html
> 
>  Quickly look at it, and it seems similar to hygienic macros, see

Not quite, though they have broadly similar goals. Macros only work
for explicit macro calls with parameters, where the basic syntactic
structure of a macro call is fixed and pre-determined (e.g. Lisp,
Dylan, C). Hygienic macros happen to be careful about generating
unique variable names in the macro expansion, but still work with a
fixed pre-defined macro-call syntax).

The work I referred to permits much more flexibility in the
incremental definition of syntax, permitting something like:

 join p in Persons, s in Students where equal (p.name) (s.name)

I believe such a facility would allow end-programmer to define

 x foo {block} braz {other block}

as the syntax to invoke one of her methods. Perhaps the implicit block
syntax (whose rationale, I am guessing, is largely syntactic
pleasantness) might be a special case of such a more general facility.