Norman Ramsey writes:
When I compare Lisp and Haskell, the big question in my mind is this: is lazy evaluation sufficient to make up for the lack of macros?
it might make sense for Haskell to have a facility that makes it possible for the programmer to define new bits of syntactic sugar without changing the compiler. eg, I recently wanted case2 foo of ... as sugar for foo >>= \output-> case output of ... if you want to call such an easy-sugar-making facility a macro facility, fine by me. personally, I wouldnt bother with such a facility. aside from simple macros that are just sugar, macros go against the Haskell philosophy, imo, because macros do not obey as many formal laws as functions do and because a macro is essentially a new language construct. rather than building what is essentially a language with dozens and dozens of constructs, the Haskell way is to re-use the 3 constructs of lambda calculus over and over again (with enough sugar to keep things human-readable).