merits of Lisp vs Python

[Robert Brown]

Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> writes:
> For a long time Scheme had no macros, and Scheme developers who were
> exceedingly familiar with Common Lisp were nonetheless willing to get
> by without them.  So I have to think macros aren't all THAT important.
> Scheme did eventually get macros, but somewhat different from CL's.

Macros are important enough that all the old Scheme implementations I used
offered macros in the style of Lisp's defmacro.  Lisp hackers did not have
to suffer without them when writing Scheme code.

Relatively recently, the Scheme standard was augmented with hygenic macros,
a different beast.  Scheme standardizes something only when there's nearly
universal support for it, so features appear in the language standard very
slowly.

bob