What are AST Macros?

[Don]

retard wrote:
> Thu, 08 Jul 2010 21:43:57 -0400, Robert Jacques wrote:
> 
>> Check out Walter's slides and/or talk from the D conference.
>> (http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?
> art_group=digitalmars.D.announce&article_id=12555)
>> AST does stand for abstract syntax tree and they are much more like Lisp
>> macros as opposed to the C preprocessor.
> 
> Too bad nothing happened. He promised AST macros, but it will probably 
> still take several years before we have a preliminary implementation and 
> maybe 10-20 years before a written spec & almsot bug-free implementation.

Part of what happened was that at the conference, I showed that the 
functionality of string mixins was a superset of what was planned for 
AST macros. Since that time, there has not been any kind of proposal, or 
even a concept. So it's a bit meaningless to talk about "AST macros" 
right now as if they were a planned-but-not-yet-implemented feature.