On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 12:06 AM, Eli Barzilay <[email protected]> wrote:
> Just now, Alex Shinn wrote:
>
> > It's equivalent to writing a macro which can parse and optimize
> > literal PCRE regex strings,
>
> Absolutely, but that doesn't bother me because with the above `let' I
> don't expect whatever to affect the meaning of a "foo+bar" string.
>
[... general discussion of why strings are superior to sexps ...]
I never thought I'd have to explain this on a Scheme or Lisp
related list, but the advantages of sexps are:
1. You don't need a parser.
- Faster development time for new DSLs because you're
not writing a parser.
- Smaller executable size (the PCRE parser is by far the
largest part of irregex).
- Faster - parsing moved from runtime to compile time
- Safer - no parse errors at runtime
2. Easier to learn
- Programmers don't have to learn a whole new parser
syntax, they just learn the names and semantics.
3. Easier to handle with existing Scheme tools.
- Notably syntax-rules _can_ walk this statically if the
bindings are the same.
Sexps are hands-down superior. Personally I have no
trouble remembering that within the SRE syntax the bindings
never change - actually it would be impossible to read if
the bindings changed, because there are so many and because
I don't think of it as Scheme to begin with. You can still
have escapes (unquote) into Scheme code and preserve
hygiene there.
--
Alex
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