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1 point by cchooper 5781 days ago | link | parent

I'm afraid it's the only thing that works.

But there's nothing wrong with it. You're doing non-performance sensitive metaprogramming, which is a perfect example of where eval should be used.



1 point by shader 5780 days ago | link

I just found the macro varif on Anarki, which returns the value if bound. Would that be better, or worse? I should think it might be a little better, but I don't know.

True, this is running, I think, in the repl. So I don't think it matters that much. But having a good way to look up the value of a symbol is kind of important, I think. I want to do similar things that might be used in a "performance-sensitive" environment, not that arc is really performance sensitive in general. ;)

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1 point by cchooper 5777 days ago | link

varif will be better if you can use it in what you're doing. It doesn't evaluate its argument, which might make it useless to you.

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1 point by shader 5777 days ago | link

rntz wanted two separate functions to search macs and defs, so I suggested filtering the sig table based on whether each symbol was a mac or fn; that would only be possible if there was a way to turn the symbol into a value we could take the type of.

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1 point by cchooper 5777 days ago | link

But do you need to evaluate the argument to varif in your implementation? If so, then it's no good to you.

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