André Thieme wrote: > Well, macros are one (big) thing that Lisp has and which many other > languages don't have. Their are other things too, and some of them are > in Python as well, which is a very nice scripting language.
I think s-exprs and EVAL are the main things that Lisp has and that other languages don't. Note that most other languages don't have these because they were deemed to be a bad trade-off three decades ago. ;-) > Often macros save just some bits of code. Saving one loc is not much you > might say. But think about it the other way around. > How would you like it to call doodleShooble() each time before you use > the if statement? Of course you would not like it. The good thing about > Lisp is, that you can eliminate this pattern. You can eliminate that pattern with a HOF, of course. You don't need macros. let if' p e1 e2 = doodleShooble(); force (if p then e1 else e2) -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Objective CAML for Scientists http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/index.html?usenet -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list