Re: macros, procedure->macro

[Dirk Herrmann <dirk@sallust.ida.ing.tu-bs.de>]

On Mon, 1 Jul 2002, Rob Browning wrote:

> Dirk Herrmann <dirk@sallust.ida.ing.tu-bs.de> writes:
> 
> > If all results are positive, I will go ahead and remove the support
> > for "macros" from guile.  After that, I will take a close look at "acros"
> > and we will play a similar game with "acros" again...
> 
> It may also be important to consider pssyntax (i.e. syntax-case,
> etc.).  In the end I'd like to have one unified macro system whose
> behavior and interactions with the rest of guile are very clear.

True, but currently I am looking at the backend of evaluation, while
syntax-case is at the very front.  In the long term, I would like to see
the evaluation split into the following phases:

1) read
2) syntax-transformation
3) scheme-to-scheme-optimization
4) memoization
5) execution

Reading is obvious.  Syntax transformation is the "one unified macro
system" that you mention.  The result should be scheme code, which may
only hold a limited set of built-in syntactic forms.  The reason I'd like
to see a scheme to scheme optimization phase after this is, that these
optimizations would be target independent, and a lot of code from other
scheme implementations could be used here.  The memoization will be
dependent on the target code format (it could even compile to machine
code), and so will execution.

Best regards
Dirk


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