Thesis on metaprogramming in D

[Steve Horne]

On Fri, 01 Dec 2006 00:35:36 +0800, Daniel Keep
<daniel.keep+lists at gmail.com> wrote:

>Don Clugston wrote:

>> It does seem, though, that Nemerle and D are exploring a quite similar 
>> 'paradigm space' (so there's probably quite a bit each can learn from 
>> the other). Yet neither has really caught up with Lisp. Yet.
>
>No language will ever catch up to LISP: the only way to do that would be 
>to become LISP, and then you have to deal with all those bloody 
>parentheses :3

Not sure I agree entirely.

In my view, the things that define the Lisp language are...

1.  The metaprogramming stuff, with a rather sparse core language
    being extended using library macros.

2.  The list based on pair (cons) objects.

3.  The explicit AST-structuring using parentheses.

Well, Nemerle has metaprogramming that is basically what Lisp does
with some extra tweaks. Nemerle has pair-object based lists. And
Nemerle has explicit AST-structuring using parentheses (it has a
pre-parse stage to handle this).

Nemerle is heavily Lisp influenced. It just takes ideas from other
places too. Personally, I think it may well have overtaken Lisp - just
as powerful (within the limits of the .NET platform), yet more
immediately usable.

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