Re: reading backquote expressions

Peter Seibel <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> I'm not the OP but I once went down the path, while writing a matched
> pair of interpreter/compiler for a domain specific language, of
> wishing that I could define code-templates using backquote
> syntax and then analyze the resulting s-exprs to generate slightly
> different code in the interpreter and compiler. But because you can't
> do that I found a completely different way to slice up my problem so I
> don't know if there would have been some other problem with that
> approach. But it seemed if `(foo ,bar ,@baz) was just sugar for
> something like Scheme's (quasiquote (foo (unquote bar)
> (unquote-splicing baz))) I could have done what I wanted pretty
> easily.

I actually don't know a strong argument against doing what Scheme did,
but I recall it seemed to upset some of the vendors, who seemed to
want to optimize these structures at read-time and apparently felt this
would work against that.

This is a place where I don't understand why users don't go to each
vendor and pressure them one by one to make the change so they can see
if the vendor has a reason not to. The hope would be that either some
vendor will tell you a reason or eventually all vendors will do the
right thing.

But I'm confused by your use of "But because you can't do that" here.
Such a defeatist tone. I recall reading in a post here that some
recent writer, I forget his name, said that one reason that Lisp excels
over Java is that if you don't like Java, you have to wait for vendors
to change, while Lisp provides you tools to rewrite the language's
syntax and so to overcome what you perceive as weaknesses. Maybe you
should buy that guy's book. ;)
.

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