If you want X, you know where to find it (was Re: do...until wisdom needed...)

[Andrew Dalke]

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