Is metaprogramming useful?

[Steve Horne]

On Wed, 29 Nov 2006 16:30:28 -0500, Brad Anderson <brad at dsource.org>
wrote:

>Sorry, gotta kick the horse one more time.
>
>http://plaza.ufl.edu/lavigne/infix.lisp

Well...

Of course that macro is actually using quoted expressions and a
'compiler' in its implementation - using a macro to hide the
'compiler' is cheating a bit, really. And it's neither trivial nor,
AFAICS, a standard library - just one persons how-to-do-it example.

I confess it's certainly shorter than I expected, but that's partly
because it is just a precedence parser - it only handles precedence
and associativity. But then that's probably no bad thing - concepts
should be kept separate rather than being bundled, which is probably a
major failing in how I was looking at this (the idea of a huge
extensible dialect library, rather than a small concept library).

And given the point Georg made about Common Lisp vs. Scheme, which
certainly suggests that some of my resistance is misplaced...

I don't think you've quite proven me wrong (yet), but clearly my
position is a lot weaker than I thought and probably unsustainable.
And since my only remaining defence is actually a point you appear to
agree with (your link isn't a standard, which relates back to the
coherence thing you mentioned) I have no choice but to withdraw what I
said.


The worrying thing is that I think I'm still on probation from a
certain Lisp-related-ignorance incident on comp.lang.python a few
years back - please don't tell on me!

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