[mercury-users] lisp macros

[Michael Day]

> I used to hack a lot of Lisp; I don't miss the macro facility.

Looks like it comes down to whether you prefer a fixed language with most
of what you need, or a very basic language which you can extend into a
domain specific language of your own.

However the point about adding source to source transformations or
optimisations into the compiler could be solved by the compiler exposing
an internal API and offering the ability to dynamically load modules
similarly to Apache. That would be much more effort for someone to write
compared to macros, but would meet Ralph's criteria of not making it so
easy to extend the language in crazy ways and Peter's criteria of allowing
people outside the core development team to extend the language.

I must admit that the idea of yet *another* DCG syntax variant is a little
wearying :)

Michael

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