From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,f34f1a1939dc0c40 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Brian Rogoff Subject: Re: conditional compilation Date: 2000/08/02 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 653776954 References: <87d7jvp3qq.fsf@chiark.greenend.org.uk> <39857E5F.33C40014@acm.com> <3985FB16.82D140BB@below.for.email.address> <8m6log$r3a$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <398749EF.15829554@below.for.email.address> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Complaints-To: abuse@verio.net X-Trace: sjc-read 965253430 206.184.139.136 (Wed, 02 Aug 2000 21:57:10 GMT) Organization: Verio MIME-Version: 1.0 NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 02 Aug 2000 21:57:10 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 2000-08-02T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Robert A Duff wrote: > In any case, from a language design point of view, if you think the > compiler should see things in a different order or different > organization than human beings, then clearly the programming language is > poorly designed. That isn't so clear to me. I don't think Common Lisp, Scheme and Dylan are poorly designed because they include powerful macro systems. I believe their designers feel that syntactic abstraction is important enough to include facilities in the language for extensible syntax. That may conflict with some of the design goals of Ada, but I don't thnk it clearly indicates poor design. > Macros can be used to get around poor language > designs. They can also be used to change the syntax of the language so that it is more suitable for a particular problem. There are lots of things I don't like about Lisp, but the inclusion of a powerful macro system is not among them. -- Brian