Re: LuaMacro

[Vyacheslav Egorov <mraleph@...>]

Bret Victor wrote:
> This works because Haskell is lazy, so unused function arguments are never 
> evaluated. 
>   
I was talking about programming languages that adopted strict evaluation 
strategies, because Lua is one of these. Still I never stated this 
explicitly. Thanks for noting that ;)

Laziness is powerful mechanism, still less powerful then macroses are. 
Reasons:

0. It works only in tandem with functions.
1. You can make language lazy through macroses. But not vice versa.
2. Laziness allows you to manipulate "delayed segments of computation" 
as whole. But with macroses (at least with AST based ones) you can 
manipulate their parts, you can decompose these segments in arbitrary 
ways, you can even manipulate with segments that compute nothing.

> The point is that, in an expressive enough language, control structures can 
> be defined with functions, not macros.
Yes, but still there are a lot of things that cannot be done with 
functions or can be done in a very obscure way. Otherwise there is no 
reason for Template Haskell to exist =)

P.S. Also I will prefer writing a small macros to exploding my head 
while inventing yet-another-monad.

--
e.v.e