On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 03:47:46AM +0000, Aled Gest wrote:
> I totally agree that the C pre-processor sucks. It's ill thought out
> and needs replacing.
Any proposals?
> However, going back to what you were saying about
> you being able to subdue Lisp's syntax with macros, any language that
> requires macros to hide its syntax is poorly designed.
Please don't say a language is poorly designed if you don't know that
language.
> Macros are there to aid programming.
They are so in Lisp.
> You shouldn't need to create a new language
> out of macros to get the job done, otherwise you might as well just
> use another language in the first place.
The problem is that no language can anticipate any your need. And then
you are forced to go and write ugly C macros or something similar.
> Are you denying that Lisp's primary concept is that it treats
> everything as a list?
Yes. Bad books on programming treat Lisp as a "functional programming
language with list as the only data structure" but it isn't.
Its primary concept is the transparency of the program's abstract
syntax tree (due to the syntax simplicity).
Received on Fri Nov 13 2009 - 10:45:06 UTC
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