Nice insights from William Byrd

[David Nolen]

Many insights despite of Byrd's Lisp-y bias http://clojure.com/blog/2012/02/16/take5-william-byrd.html

The Kanor (supercomputing) and Harlan (GPU) languages both sound very, very interesting.

David

[Sam Aaron]

On 16 Feb 2012, at 18:08, David Nolen wrote:

> Many insights despite of Byrd's Lisp-y bias http://clojure.com/blog/2012/02/16/take5-william-byrd.html

Does anyone have any pointers that will expand upon Byrd's issues with Clojure's macro system perhaps highlighting what the direction of future of macro systems might be?

Sam

---
http://sam.aaron.name

[Peteris Erins]

For reference, the Indiana University Scheme page is at
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/proglang/scheme/iucs.html with links to some
great resources.

--
Peteris Erins

On Feb 16, 6:08 pm, David Nolen <dnolen.li...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Many insights despite of Byrd's Lisp-y biashttp://clojure.com/blog/2012/02/16/take5-william-byrd.html

[Manuel Simoni]

On Feb 16, 10:19 pm, Sam Aaron <samaa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Does anyone have any pointers that will expand upon Byrd's issues with Clojure's macro system perhaps highlighting what the direction of future of macro systems might be?

One interesting newer macro system is SRFI 72 [1] by Andre van Tonder.
It's basically a hygienic defmacro, so you can write e.g. the swap
macro exactly as in Common Lisp, but it will be automagically
hygienic:

(define-syntax (swap! a b)
#`(let ((temp ,a))
(set! ,a ,b)
(set! ,b temp))))

(#` is hygienic quasiquote)

A completely different approach to hygiene is offered by Kernel's
fexprs [2]. Fexprs make the whole issue of hygiene moot, because they
simply use lexical scope already built in to the language to maintain
hygiene, as I've explained on LtU [3].

[1] http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-72/srfi-72.html
[2] http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/kernel.html
[3] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4345#comment-66868