I was expecting that Arthur would come up with a preprocessor written
in (I guess) 30 lines of Elisp... a lot of people would like to play
with it, add tests, modify it, and so on - and we could use it to
learn how to create our own preprocessors.

A preprocessor written as patch to the C source of Emacs feels useless
to me.

  [[]],
    Eduardo Ochs
    http://angg.twu.net/#eev
    http://angg.twu.net/emacsconf2019.html

On Fri, 20 Dec 2019 at 13:18, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
wrote:

> > I really understand the concern, but I must ask how would one change the
> > elisp itself without re-implementing much or some of of elisp parser if
> it would
> > be done externally?
>
> I recommend you take a look at the existing function used on
> load-source-file-function (i.e. load-with-code-conversion): it loads the
> source file into a buffer and then calls `eval-buffer`.
>
> So all it would take is for you to erase the text (aka non-code) part of
> the source code before passing it to `eval-buffer` (but of course, only
> do it when that source is using your new format).
>
> Or instead of `eval-buffer` you might "manually" skip the text parts,
> then use `read` + `eval` on the code parts.  This would probably take
> a bit more effort in order to correctly handle (defvar foo).
>
>
>         Stefan
>
>
>