If you want X, you know where to find it (was Re: do...until wisdom needed...)
Andrew Dalke
dalke at acm.org
Wed Apr 18 22:07:18 EDT 2001
Douglas Alan wrote:
>It's a very modern language (more modern in some ways than Python,
>multimethods and a sophisticated meta-object protocol being examples
>of two very modern features that it supports),
Yet more things I don't know about. *Sigh*. OTOH, if you want
to know about details of structural biology data structures and
use cases .. I'm there!
>Well, yes, you could use a procedural macro (hygienic, or otherwise)
>to convert Pascal code to Python, but it would be one really big hairy
>macro, and I don't think that be a good idea.
Someone else pointed out to me in private mail a converter from
Fortran to Lisp. I think would prefer doing that by calling a
function with a string parameter and getting back, say, a module
object with the right function interfaces and constants defined.
> More modestly, you
>might define two macros, "let" and "set" so that
>
> let x = 3
This would at present raise a SyntaxError exception. I suppose
beforehand there would be a statement to make "let" be known
as a new keyword? How do linters and other code checking utilities
work on this sort of mutability? After all, they don't right
now do a good job parsing escaped ()s inside of regexps, which
is another example of a little language embedded inside of a
bigger (and different) one.
Andrew
dalke at acm.org
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