[Haskell-cafe] Re: Doing some things right

Brian Sniffen wrote:

On Dec 28, 2007 6:05 AM, Andrew Coppin wrote:

...

[I actually heard a number of people tell me that learning LISP would change my life forever because LISP has something called "macros". I tried to learn it, and disliked it greatly. It's too messy. And what the heck is "cdr" ment to mean anyway? To me, LISP doesn't even seem all that different from normal languages (modulo weird syntax). Now Haskell... that's FUN!]

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Macros are like Template Haskell. One example of where they're useful is programmer definition of new binding forms. That's not possible in Haskell without Templates. Macros were invented in Lisp because the syntax is so easy for machine manipulation---they don't have a tenth the complexity of Template Haskell for about the same power.

-Brian

There is also Likell, at http://liskell.org/ by Clemens Fruhwir, which translates Haskell source into a lisp style prefix syntax (will (all (the (parentheses)))). This is to allow macro-like analysis and transformation without template haskell. The main use of template haskell that I have seen mentioned on the mailing lists is to analyze a "data" declaration and auto-generate some new "class" and "instance" declarations. But I agree that template haskell has problems: (*) Its own syntax, as big and complicated as Haskell (*) Has historically been very poorly documented (that _might_ have changed) (*) Only works with ghc -- Chris