On Mon, 28 Sep 2020 at 13:56, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
For usage, whether something is a macro or not should either be irrelevant (when they're used as a more powerful function call or decorator), or else entirely obvious from the way you use it (when they're defining a new pseudo-statement), so it doesn't make sense to emphasize the syntactic marker too much.
IMHO `import!` can be easily confused with `import`, even with a monospace font. An alternative is that macro must have a name different from keywords (so you will have macro_import!, for example), even if I'd prefer my first proposal (maybe something like %import).
Putting the marker gives the compiler the info and reader the info they need without being too obtrusive (and also matches the way Rust macros are used). Using "!" as a prefix operator is also effectively already claimed by IPython for shell command execution, so I'd be surprised if we ever used that spelling for anything else.
Python uses None instead of Null and try-except instead of try-catch :-) PS: I agree with the rest of the post.