Re: A macro and an unwanted containing list in the resulting form

[Sebastian Tennant <sebyte@smolny.plus.com>]

Quoth Pascal Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com>:
> Sebastian Tennant <sebyte@smolny.plus.com> writes:
>>> Is there any reason to make the argument of build-cond an alist? You
>>>could try
>>>
>>> (defmacro build-cond (&rest conds)
>>>  (append '(cond)
>>>          (mapcar '(lambda (each)
>>>                    (cons (list 'equal 'my-var (car each)) (list (cdr each))))
>>>                  conds)))
>>>
>>> and then use
>>>
>>>  (build-cond ("hello" . (message "hi"))
>>>              ("goodbye" . (message "bye"))
>>
>> The reason for the alist is the clauses are being passed as one of a
>> number of arguments to a function call.
>
> If you get the a-list as argument to a function, then you don't need a
> macro to process it!   Just write a loop!
>
> (require 'cl)
>
> (defun my-function (string clauses)
>   (loop
>       for clause in clauses
>       until (string= string (car clause))
>       finally (eval (cdr clause))))
>
> (my-function "goodbye" '(("hello"   . (message "hi"))
>                          ("goodbye" . (message "bye"))))
>

Whoa!  This isn't LISP!  At least it doesn't look like it to me.
Where are the parentheses?  I suppose I haven't got the first idea how
the Common Lisp 'loop' function works...???

Sebastian