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1 point by rocketnia 5281 days ago | link | parent

Anyone have any ideas on how to allow macro indirection via namespaces without having first class macros?

Lathe's approach (where namespaces are friendly-name-to-unfriendly-global-name tables encapsulated by macros):

  arc> (use-rels-as ut (+ lathe-dir* "utils.arc"))
  #(tagged mac #<procedure: nspace-indirect>)
  arc> (macex1 '(ut (xloop a list.7 b 0 a.b)))
  (gs2012-xloop a list.7 b 0 a.b)
  arc> (macex '(ut (xloop a list.7 b 0 a.b)))
  ((rfn next (a b) a.b) list.7 0)
  arc> (ut:xloop a list.7 b 0 a.b)
  7
Maybe we should try and design a set of very basic namespace handling tools, and then allow users to extend off of them.

Funny, that's part of what I had in mind as I made Lathe's module system. :-p Is there some aspect of Lathe's namespace handling that's inconsistent with what you have in mind? The point of the Lathe module system is mainly to keep the rest of the Lathe utilities safe from name conflicts, so I'll gladly swap it out if we can come up with a better approach.

(In case you haven't heard me rant about Lathe before, you can get to my original blog post about the module system via http://arclanguage.org/item?id=11610 and see all the current Lathe code at http://github.com/rocketnia/lathe. )