Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Dylan Programming Guide

Open Dylan (via Hacker News):

The Dylan Programming Guide has been updated to use our new documentation format. As a result it is now available in PDF and ePub formats as well as much improved HTML.

There were a lot of good ideas in Apple’s Dylan language. For example:

C and C++ macros are text substitutions, performed by a preprocessor. The preprocessor has no understanding of the language; it simply splices together text fragments to create replacement phrases.

Dylan macros are written in terms of Dylan language elements; the macros choose their transformation by pattern matching, and they substitute program fragments.

Language-based macros are more powerful than — and avoid a number of common pitfalls of — text-substitution macros.

Update (2013-02-17): The Hacker News thread.

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