Re: Interesting: "Lisp as a competitive advantage"

Norman Ramsey wrote:

I would love to hear from a real Lisp macro hacker who has also done lazy functional progrmaming.

I am such a person. Lisp macros are a way to extend the Lisp compiler. Dylan's example shows why this reflective power is sometimes useful. Here is another example. I once wrote a macro to help express pattern-matching rules. In these rules, variables that began with a question mark were treated specially. Having learned Haskell, I am not tempted to go back to Lisp. Yet I occasionally wish for some sort of reflective syntactic extension. - Tim Sauerwein