do...until wisdom needed...

[Courageous]

On 17 Apr 2001 19:02:54 -0400, Douglas Alan <nessus at mit.edu> wrote:

>> But is something that every expert would have to relearn each time they
>> tuch someone else's code.
>
>Everytime you read someone else's code you have to understand the
>functions they've defined before you can understand their code.  Let's
>get rid of functions too!

This remark is quite apropros: as a professional lisp programmer (not
necessarily by preference, but so it goes), I find maintaining code with
the occasional hygienic macro to be no more difficult than understanding
someone else's functions. I believe this is a very apt analogy.

Now one thing that I would say is that, if hygienic macros were present
in Python, the primary Python distributions themselves should not add
additional looping construct macros or other language-altering macros
as part of any particular release. The addition of a "standard core of
language transmogrifying macros" (ala the proliferation of a dozen or
so looping constructs in Lisp) would probably create the very problem
that the other poster is referring to.

C//