Re: LuaMacro

[Stefan Sandberg <keffo.sandberg@...>]

Inlining is purely a platform dictated 'sideffect', or whatever you want 
to call it.. Inlining lua code doesn't make much sense, but it does for 
languages compiled to native code. (I guess that would include luajit, 
and I'm sure senior pall has ventured there on many occasions in his code)

In other words, inlining is not so much a language feature but a 
compiler optimization to better reach it's intended hardware as good as 
possible.

Macro's on the other hand have nothing to do with inlining, and are 
purely a tool for the engineer to (I guess) get around shortcomings in 
language implementations or just to tidy up/write less code.

guuh, difficult to explain, macros -do- relate to inlining in the 
strictest sense of the word, but related to text, not hardware.. :)

Peter Sommerfeld wrote:
> Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote
> > The real "selling point" for a macro
> > mechanism is what you can do with its macros that you cannot do with
> > functions. And (at least for me) the real interesting question is *why*
> > you cannot do with functions what you can do with macros.
>
> Inlining for instance to achieve better performance with small 
> functions. Special forms for creating sublanguages...
>
> Peter