There have been Lisp dialects where you could control the evaluation
of arguments like this

(DEFINE QUOTE-REVERSE FEXPR (ARGS)
   (REVERSE ARGS))

where the FEXPR indicates to the system not to evaluate the arguments,
or even with more fine grained control

(DEFINE F (X &QUOTE Y) ...)

where X would be evaluated and Y not.

Even in these dialects there are differences between functions and
macros. It would be possible to implement LOOP as a FEXPR function,
but this would force parsing and interpreting of the LOOP form at each
invocation. In contrast a macro implementation does that work once. On
the other hand an FEXPR function can use the local environment.

   For instance, with functions you can write your own Lisp
   interpreter or compiler which implements macros, and then
   use that.

   For instance, a lot of the things you do with macros could
   instead be done (at the cost of repeated code and syntactic
   inconvenience) by packaging up the lumps of code that the
   macro would work on inside closures and feeding those to
   ordinary functions.

2. Macros are for doing things that can't be done with functions.

   For instance, extending the syntax of your language without
   having to reimplement the whole thing.

   For instance, expressing operations that manipulate lumps of
   code without needing lots of syntactic noise.

I suspect that whoever told you "everything that can be done
with macros can be done with lambdas" meant the second of
the for-instances under #1 above, in which case "everything"
goes way too far: macros can do things that go way beyond
just deciding which arguments to evaluate when. In other
words, with the meaning I think they intended, the statement
is wrong. But it's hard to be sure because there's so much
ambiguity in it.

The people who've said you won't really understand what's
going on here without diving in and learning some more
are probably correct, by the way.

Perhaps you are an expert with years of experience, but I am not. I realise
I ask daft questions and this one probably isn't last. You might feel upset
that someone asked such obvious question. Tell me haw many years ago last
time you asked a question which could be daft to an expert. Even if it was
ages ago you had to start somewhere.

It reminds me of situation with Linux. Some people complain that when you
ask a question you get reply RTFM, which means Read The ******* Manual. Now
I write this message on a Linux box, so I got there, I hope to do the same
with Lisp. It's just easier sometimes to get an answer from a human than
looking for it through the books.

  It is not your "daft" questions that bother me, it is that you put people who
  answer you in an impossible situation.  You ask people to confirm that you
  are right or correct you if you are wrong.  This is actually unworkable.  It
  may work for trivial questions of fact, but philosophical-like questions
  cannot be dealt with that way.  And programming languages carry philosophies
  that you need to grasp before you grasp the programming language.

| Tell me haw many years ago last time you asked a question which could be
| daft to an expert.  Even if it was ages ago you had to start somewhere.

  Here you assume that everybody else is just like you.  This is just not the
  case.  Until you realize that you have a counter-producitve approch to the
  whole knowledge-acquisition process, you will not really figure anything out,
  but you will /think/ you do.  The desire you exhibit to be /correct/ is the
  only thing that is really "daft" here.  Things are not "correct".  When you
  are in the learning phase, things have a different meaning than when you are
  more experienced.  Concepts are usually disconnected when you new to a field
  and sentences change meaning as you connect the underlying concepts.

  I have always been humble towards knowledge I do not have, of systems I do
  not know, of philosophies that I do not know.  What makes it able to learn
  very quickly is that I listen to what experienced people say and ask them the
  questions that will help me connect things.  My goal is understand as deeply
  as possible what is going on around me.  I have no use for sentences whose
  meaning I do not know, but which other people say is "correct".  If I base my
  reasoning on a misunderstanding of a "correct" statement, I shall have very
  significant problem clearing this up.  When asked, the likelihood that I will
  repeat a "correct" statement, but meaning something other than other people
  interpret it to mean, is very significant.  Many people have found themselves
  flunked after believing misunderstandings of "correct" statements.  Back when
  I helped fellow students, this was in fact /the/ most significant cause of
  their problems.  More often than not, they could repeat textbook statements
  flawlessly, but made the oddest reasoning from them.  I discovered that in
  the teaching position, the largest problem is to discover the last point at
  which the student had actually understood things, such you coul revert to
  that position and fix the first mistake out of that state.  Many students are
  unable to think clearly and therefore muddle through a mess of guesswork and
  random connections, where they are unprepared for the scrutiy of their
  thinking that debugging it necessarily entails.  The largest problem I have
  seen in my own and fellow students was been a lack of thinking skills.  Most
  people are simply unskilled at thinking and have "succeeded" with fairly
  idiotic ersatz devices until they really have to grapple with abstract ideas
  and then feel stupid even though they are quite intelligent by nature (so
  they have managed to keep their lack of thinking skills a secret from both
  themselves and others).  Now, depending on whether their self-esteem is based
  in the belief that their intelligence is under attack if they make stupid
  mistakes or whether it is based in the certainty that they are intelligent
  enough to get out of any situation they might wittingly or unwittingly get
  themselves into.  Those who believe their intelligence cannot be as high as
  they had hoped if they make stupid mistakes generally tend to have brittle
  egoes and therefore incorrigible and just continue on their erroneous path
  and eventually arrive someplace useful, from where they will announce loudly
  that they were never wrong to begin with.  This personality trait tends to
  waste enormous amounts of effort in protecting their brittle self-esteem.
  The other kind, who trust their intelligence to get them through anything,
  will react to a realization that they made a stupid mistake with an apology,
  almost, and then work hard to correct it.  All their energy goes into making
  sure they get things as right as possible, but no obsessive compulsions about
  being correct at any time. More than anything else, methological differences
  like this predict future ability to deal with the unexpected and unknown.  If
  you believe you have to /be/ correct, you will make many mistakes.  If you
  believe you can always /become/ correct, you will be correct most of the time.

  Just because you are a novice does not mean that you ask "daft" questions.
  You do not have to be an expert to realize that "correct me if I'm wrong" is
  a recipe for grave mistakes and serious confusion down the line.

  Just over three weeks ago, I wrote a scathing review of a manuscript on the
  Semantic Web, after having spent another three weeks with that manuscript.
  Then I visited my local library and talked with their staff and learned that
  the 5th edition of the Norwegian adaption of the Dewey Decimal Classification
  was just around the corner.  I acquired the books and got all excited about
  the ability to use this enormous and ongoing work for managing the "ontology"
  of the Semantic Web.  I have since then been communicating with almost 50
  people in national libraries in Norway, England, Germany, and the U.S., and
  several large public libraries in Norway.  According to some, I have come up
  to speed in two weeks compared with the two years fresh college students in
  information and library science require to understand the same isuses.  This
  is not because I am old and very experienced and have always learned quickly,
  but because I /listen/ to people who more than I do and because I am willing
  to put in 16 hours a day to learn something from the best available sources.
  Keep learning new things by spending two hours studying something you have no
  immediate use for as a daily routine for three decades, and you just know a
  lot and can connect a lot more dots than if you only learn while "forced" to
  by teachers and exams and the like.  Add good methodology and things come
  real easy after a while.  With no "daft" questions in sight.  Avoiding stupid
  questions is /not/ intractable, just ask intelligent questions, meaning those
  whose answers actually mean something to you personally and actually help you
  understand something at your current level of expertise.

  Some say there are no stupid questions, but this is a lie.  A stupid question
  is a question to which the answer would not benefit the questioner.

| It's just easier sometimes to get an answer from a human than looking
| for it through the books.

  Books give you the clear advantage that you learn at your own pace.  The
  books were written by people who were trained in presenting the material in a
  pedagogical manner, their manuscripts went through several drafts, and the
  people who reviewed it have slaughtered parts of it and encouraged other
  parts.  A book is an immense cooperative project.  Any given individual you
  ask will require a personal rapport with your prior understanding before he
  can provide you with useful and contextually relevant and correct answers.
  You need to be aware of this process when you ask questions and receive
  answers to them.

Amen! In fact, this is *so* true that for the last several years I
have made it an absolute requirement that before agreeing to assist
someone on a project via email that we have at least one lengthy
face-to-face meeting -- or if that is not possible (e.g., the person is
in a distant country) at the *very* least a lengthy telephone call --
during which we mutually introduce ourselves, go into some considerable
detail on our backgrounds, technical histories, skills, technical
preferences/prejudices (e.g., we {love,hate} {C,C++,Perl,PHP,Lisp,etc.}),
so that we have enough (or at least a bare minimum of) context about
each other to be able to at least ask the right *questions*!!

With such an intro, the subsequent email exchanges tend to be crisp,
to the point, and fruitful. (Though every so often, another, much-shorter
phone call my be required to "get back in sync".)

But without such a mutual "core dump" intro, almost invariably *enormous*
amounts of time get wasted in an increasingly lengthy and frustrating
series of email exchanges as we attempt resolve a growing cloud of
confusion and misunderstanding and try to hammer out some common ground
for cooperation.

Now how does one apply that to coming to a new newsgroup? It doesn't
seem to offer any hope! Well, actually, it does, though the process
just takes a *lot* longer. Instead of single dinner meeting or one
several-hour phone call, when coming to a newsgroup new to you
(technical or not), for the first several weeks (yes, I said *weeks*!),
just "lurk" -- that is, only read what others write; don't post anything
of your own.

First, you will almost surely find the answers to most of your initial
questions (e.g., "Is there an FAQ for this group?", "Are there some
resource web sites?"), but much more importantly, you will (1) learn
the style of interaction which is practiced in that group, and (2) learn
who the main players are, and who generally gives good advice (or at
least well-reasoned answers) and who just flames & trolls.

But you also need to go *read* the various off-newsgroup references
you see mentioned -- for comp.lang.lisp, that means exploring most of
<URL:http://www.lisp.org/> for starters, as well learning how to use
<URL:http://www.lispworks.com/reference/HyperSpec/Front/index.htm>.

Then, and only then, you might (actually, probably *will*) have enough
context to pose "reasonable" newbie questions...

-Rob

don't take his words to serious.

I think nobody who knows him does that. He has something like a
'diplomatic immunity' in this forum.

The adressed person, the "immune", is high-intelligent.

But somehow the soul of the "immune high-intellingent" has been filled
with bitterness. You can read this in his words. Read carefully a few posts.

The "immune high-intelligent bitter" becames often due to his biterrness
irrational. High intelligence is not a guarantee for high-rationality
(in context of calm, of where to apply the high-intelligence).

I don't think that the "immune high-intelligent bitter irrational" takes
his endless babbling serious. Endless babbling about information the
posters (e.g. you) haven't requested.

Even if this babbling of the "immune high-intelligent bitterly
irrational babbler" has an essence, the posters are in general not
willing to switch into the condition "deep, philosophy, recognition,
reflection".

The posters have a small simple problem and they want a small simple
solution or discussion. They are in the condition "small problem,
discuss". And in general *they* decide when they are in the condition to
deal with "deep, philosophy, recognition, reflection" - a big complex
problem.

Forcing someone into this condition (especially without answering to the
main problem) is very ungentle and serves primary (if not only) personal
needs. This behaviour is very egoistic.

Maybe the "immune high-intelligent bitterly irrational egoistic babbler"
doesn't take himself serious and sees the posters in this forum as his
personal puppets.

I've identified many puppets (or sheeps) - Will you become one of them?

You can simply ignore the posts of the "immune high-intelligent bitter
irrational egoistic babbling puppeteer", who does not respect the
individuality of a human being.

 From the replies in the group you see: there are many people that are
kindly enouth to simply answer to your question in the way they've
understood your question.

And maybe they discuss *carefully* and with *respect* your personal
process-model of learning, *after* they have respectfully handled your
request.

Enjoy your very personal process of learning.

It is better than *any* "personal perfect process" that an

"immune high-intelligent bitter irrational egoistic disrespectful
babbling puppeteer"

suggests.

-

puppeteer.

weapon.

you.

strongest.

mine.

-

limits.

Erik does not have diplomatic immunity.

Erik is one of the few people in any forum whose messages I actually
save for later perusal.

snapdragon:~ > locate naggum | grep -v -c hyperspec
15

There are a couple people whom I wish he could tolerate better
(because I enjoy hearing their input as well).  On the other hand,
there are a few people whose flame-job I think needs touching up[1]
that he has chosen to avoid addressing. :-)

I ran across a quotation that I don't have the attribution for but I
really like:

     Perhaps the greatest damage the American system of education has
     done to its children is to teach them that their opinions are
     relevant simply because they are their opinions.

I've come to think this is not just the American system of education.
It seems to be a global problem.  I think people can say what they
want, that's their right.  But there is no `right to be heard'.  Being
heard must be earned.  Many people don't realize that there's a
difference.

bullshit!

Wrong.  (Hmn, I seem to be saying that too much, and it lacks a
certain politeness.  How about "Senator, that happens not to be the
case."  [1])

Of course your words are worthy of being heard.  After all, it's ilias
that is speaking (or rather, writing).

Your problem is your choice of topic.  Proper choice of topic is very
important.

     AND to urge another Argument of a parallel Nature.  If
     Christianity were once abolished, how could the Free Thinkers,
     the Strong Reasoners, and the Men of profound Learning, be able
     to find another Subject so calculated in all Points whereon to
     display their Abilities.  What wonderful Productions of Wit
     should we be deprived of, from those whose Genius by continual
     Practice hath been wholly turn'd upon Railery and Invectives
     against Religion, and would therefore never be able to shine or
     distinguish themselves upon any other Subject.  We are daily
     complaining of the great decline of Wit among us, and would we
     take away the greatest, perhaps the only Topick we have left?
     Who would ever have suspected Asgil for a Wit, or Toland for a
     Philosopher, if the inexhaustible Stock of Christianity had not
     been at hand to provide them with Materials.  What other Subject
     through all Art or Nature could have produced Tindall for a
     profound Author, or furnished him with Readers.  It is the wise
     Choice of the Subject that alone adorns and distinguishes the
     Writer.  For, had a Hundred such Pens as these been employed on
     the side of Religion, they would have immediately sunk into
     Silence and Oblivion. [2]

ilias, the above quotation is not meant for you to understand.  I know
you are not concerned with getting something out of reading old, musty
books.  I quoted it so that other readers could be made aware why your
intellect, obviously of such originality as to show no influence of
tutoring from any source, is having trouble displaying its true
magnitude in comp.lang.lisp.

I think you should choose some other topic than Lisp.  It doesn't
really allow you to display your true intellectual power.  Lisp users
depend far too much on their knowledge.  They expect to be able to
read books and learn something from them.  Worse, they are so
intolerant as to expect this from others as well.  They constantly
refer questioners to books, papers, specifications and other worthless
material.  They expect those with whom they interact to be capable of
understanding reasoned explanations as well as ideas of some
complexity.

Above all, they believe that a certain humility is necessary with
regard to learning.  They believe that if you want to learn something,
you might have to stretch yourself and assume that someone else has
something to teach you.  They believe that learners must sometimes
accommodate their thinking to that of their teachers.  They believe
that knowledge is a progression, that things you learn later are built
on things you learn now or have learned in the past, and that you may
have to change yourself, bring yourself to a new level, in order to
understand something new.  But your intellect is like the spheres of
the heavens, beyond change.  It requires nothing but its own faculties
to instantly comprehend anything worth comprehending.

Clearly the Spirit of Lisp is foreign to someone like you, someone who
ignores reason in favor of a powerful, inexplicable intuition, who
uses every part of himself for thinking, even those parts usually
reserved for other functions such as sitting or reproduction.  (What
inefficiency!  How often does one reproduce?  How much mass is
required for the simple act of sitting?  Could not these parts play
another, more exalted role? --- In ilias they do.)

I therefore urge, even beg, you to find some topic more worthy of your
attention.

I think a book has less chance to guess how much I know than a human can do.

There's one problem, most Lisp documentation I downloaded now is in
PostScript or PDF, and viewer I use doesn't have word search capability.

Conclusion:
Because I am new to this group I decided to spend time discussing things
with you because I will make possible to know each other a bit better. I
hope it will help a bit to get rid of some kind of communication problem
you and me have.

many many things bounded to knowledge, which i'm not able to decipher.

cause i'm undereducated.

"But your intellect is like the spheres of the heavens, beyond change."

Hmn, there really are other things I could be doing....

--
Fred Gilham     gil...@csl.sri.com

  (interpreter-function-for-language-with-macros '(defstruct foo a b
c))

Now the real trick is to get the interpreted code to interoperate
nicely with the surrounding lexical environment. Defstruct operates on
global associations, so it is easy. The slot names a, b and c have no
relationship to any surrounding material.

This is what you can't do with Lisp functions: pass down the calling
lexical environment. You can pass down closures over that environment,
but it's encapsulated.

Given a language in which you can express something like:

  (defun my-interpreter (&env calling-environment &rest forms)
     ... transform and interpret forms in calling environment
    )

Besides, for some answers one just has to read the book through, so
a word search capability is not really necessary.

The intersection of the easy ways and the ways that lead to good
results is not large (if at all non-empty).  But I have repeated,
in too many words, that famouse phrase about the royal road to
learning...

  It is also hard to explain to someone who does not know the language, and
  since those who do, tend to agree on it, it is not often verbalized.  The
  great thing about philosophers is that the are able to zoom out and look at
  that which other people take for granted and explain it in intelligent ways.
  I have search for and read a number of articles and books that have at least
  had pretentions of explaining the philosophy of programming, but I have not
  found any.  Still, some books that I have found useful:

DDC 005.1019, ISBN 0-932633-42-0, LCCN 98038794, 1998
Gerald M. Weinberg
The Psychology of Computer Programming

DDC 005.1, ISBN 0-201--61586-X, LCCN 9910131, 1999
Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike
The Practice of Programming

DDC 005.133, ISBN 0-201-54330-3, LCCN 93050758, 1994
Bjarne Stroustrup
The Design and Evolution of C++

DDC 005.1, ISBN 0-262-14053-5, LCCN 93009124, 1993
Bonnie A. Nardi
A Small Matter of Programming: Perspective on End User Comuting

DDC 005.1, ISBN 0-201-61622-X, LCCN 99043581, 2000
Andrew Hunt, David Thomas
The Pragmatic Programmer: from Journeyman to Master

  These exemplify approaches to programming that are philosophical in nature,
  although the philosophy itself is just below the surface, not explicit. Where
  mathematics has Keith Devlin or John Allan Paulos, there is no equivalent for
  computing.

| Confirming if I'm right or wrong reminds me of common way of marking students
| work at school.

  This happens precisely in the intimate relationship between questioner
  (student) and answerer (teacher/nestor) that I tried to explain that does not
  exist until you have made yourself more known to those who could answer you.
  A teacher who asks a question knows precisely what the answer is expected to
  mean.  In fact, one of the reasons that those who learn well on their own and
  go off to devour the entire library have a hard time dealing with grading
  from their teachers is that they lose track of their teachers' expectations
  and the context in which both questions and answers are normally given.

| Perhaps it is too shallow for Lisp, but I didn't realise that philosophy
| could be so important to a programming language.

  This means that you have only accepted one philosophy and are probably
  completely unaware of it.  When you find a different programming language,
  such as Common Lisp is (and Haskell and Prolog and Forth), your problems are
  first and foremost philosophical when you try to understand what they are all
  about, and those who have no philosophical bent learn only one paradigm.

| I don't think my approach is counter-productive, it's just different.  In a
| long term I think it can be as good as yours.

  Of course you do.  This is part of the problem.

| I hoped that asking the question I would be able to connect things.

  That may well be, but you did not give your potential answerers any clue as
  to what you would connect as the result of the answer.  Therefore, a correct
  answer could have deleterious consequences.

| This approach has helped me to learn english language.

  Oh, you are not a native speaker.  Not that I noticed, but this could explain
  why you (appear to) think statements have only one meaning.  English is
  delightfully able to capture a whole slew of nuances with a single sentence
  and has a highly poetic nature with a rich flow of imagery and connotations
  under the surface denotations.  Several other European languages are much
  more sterile and have significant differences between their poetic form and
  their straightforward day-to-day form.

| If answer is very simple it doesn't have to be so.  I thought that answer to
| my question would be quite simple.

  Precisely.  This misguided idea is what I really wanted to correct.

| Actually the question has meant something to me.  I was wondering if I could
| implement sort of Lisp macros in a scripting language I use.  Making in the
| process connections with things I know, or even learning from my mistakes if
| I fail.

  Well, to understand macros, you need to understand the different evaluation
  times of Common Lisp, which differ dramatically from other languages.  E.g.,
  when an expression is interpreted, a macro form is expanded and then
  interpreted in order, before the next form, but when compilng, the macro form
  is expanded at compile-time, and the compiler emits instructions to the
  target execution environment to produce the same results as if it were
  interpreted.  This both affects and is affected by the amount and kind of
  information available at each evaluation time in subtle ways.  Macros may
  cuase information to be available to other macros, but not in the run-time
  environment.  These differences are quite hard to explain, but as I hope you
  will see, they make for profound differences between macros and lambdas.

| I think a book has less chance to guess how much I know than a human can do.

  The key was really to make you aware of the guesswork involved and then to
  minimize it.  Books are good /because/ they force you to understand and
  accept the context of another person.  Requiring others to guess your context
  is not very polite in addition to being massively error-prone.  I liked Rob
  Warnick's response to my note as it highlights the kind of interactions that
  most people do not reflect on.

| There's one problem, most Lisp documentation I downloaded now is in
| PostScript or PDF, and viewer I use doesn't have word search capability.

  Then read them from start to end.

| Because I am new to this group I decided to spend time discussing things with
| you because I will make possible to know each other a bit better.  I hope it
| will help a bit to get rid of some kind of communication problem you and me
| have.

  Not a bad strategy.  I hope this helps.

I'd rather use expression way of thinking, than philosophy. I'd rather
acquire new ideas to help me adapt way of thinking that will help me better
to solve problems without love of the way of thinking as it is with
philosophy

anyway, when you say "i'd rather ..." you are philosophizing to some
degree.  people who program lisp a lot are urging you to expand your
philosophy, not replace it.  in doing so, you expand your ability to
grok lisp and ultimately your facility and joy in the pratice of lisp
programming.  this can be said of any language, so why not lisp?