with-c-syntax

More to the point of how simple (and easy) defmacro is compared to syntax-case and syntax-rules, I like another fare post: https://fare.livejournal.com/189741.html If you're as smart as fare, it "isn't too hard to translate it". Though I concede this case could be analogous to trying to write a Doubly Linked List in Rust, it's not enough to say definitively yea or nay. So I'd more like to see a concrete case you have in mind where the tradeoffs are squarely against CL. Like, the loop macro is more complicated than any I have written myself, but you can break it down, and it's not that bad -- I think Norvig's version is pretty neat to study: https://norvig.com/paip/loop.lisp This project (and it's not the only one!) adding C syntax to CL https://github.com/y2q-actionman/with-c-syntax I think is more complicated than loop, and is sort of wh

It's not easy to get the point across just by reading about it. Id honestly say you should just learn some lisp and implement something cool. > I don't see why this would be any different than defining a function like I normally do. Because with functions you don't define any new syntax or implement a DSL; you don't have access to the compiler during read, compilation, and run time. This allows you to easily extend the language: do you miss list comprehensions from Python? Add it yourself with a macro. Want to generate boilerplate code? Macro. Prolog compiler? Yes. Basically anything in this book: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp > But why is this more productive than simply defining a "exponent()" function or something similar? It's not just about defining a new operator, you can basically implement a DSL with C-like syntax if you wan

Lisp has served as an inspiration to so many programming language designs, Javascript included, that saying a language feature isn't really unique to Lisp is a bit like saying that The Lord of the Rings is just a bunch of fantasy clichés. It's true in some sense, but it also conveys a deeply flawed understanding. Here[1] is a fun example of what's possible with a Common Lisp library that would be difficult to do in many other languages without language changes or essentially just giving up and dumping the C style code in a string and calling some sort of eval on it. That is very much not the same thing. [1] https://github.com/y2q-actionman/with-c-syntax/