FWIW:
I have thought the same thing in the past. But, in practice, this has
never been a problem for me. Not once. Now I haven't written
quadrillions of lines of Lisp, but it doesn't seem to have been a
problem for those who have either.
One thing to keep in mind is that you don't typically have
(Warning: long post)
Thank you all for the answers, especially to Konrad who suggested
thinking in terms of forms instead of functions and macros. He's right
that I'm a newcomer and maybe I've rushed a bit by calling it a flaw.
I'll try thinking about it more.
As I started to learn Lisp, the syn
On 5 Mar, 02:22, Matt Revelle wrote:
> Was their a situation where not knowing if a form was a macro bit
> you? Considering that many frequently used built-ins
> are implemented as macros, capitalizing or otherwise annotating-in-
> name would be annoying.
No. What bothers me is not being able
> expressions get evaluated and which don't, at least when you are dealing
with side effects.
I think that this is the key point. The Clojure syntax is built around its
pure-functional core. Side effects are dangerous, and the rule there is
"mutator beware."
Joshua
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On 05.03.2009, at 02:03, Elena wrote:
> I wonder if Clojure does employ the same syntax either for macros and
> functions by design or it's just a remainder of Lisp. I think that a
I am sure it's by design, just as for Lisp. Remember that Lisp has
been around for 50 years and has been used by
Hi Elena,
I thinks the Lisp convention says something about how to think about
Lisp programs. Well-written macros shouldn't require you to think
about the fact that they are macros.
Instead of thinking about functions calls vs. macro calls, try to
think of "forms". A form can be a function cal
>I think that a
> shared syntax for both macros and functions calls is a flaw in the
> syntax of Lisps, because you can't tell, just by looking at a form,
> which expressions get evaluated and which don't, at least when you are
> dealing with side effects.
You might want to think about macros s
On Mar 4, 2009, at 8:03 PM, Elena wrote:
>
> I wonder if Clojure does employ the same syntax either for macros and
> functions by design or it's just a remainder of Lisp. I think that a
> shared syntax for both macros and functions calls is a flaw in the
> syntax of Lisps, because you can't tell,
I wonder if Clojure does employ the same syntax either for macros and
functions by design or it's just a remainder of Lisp. I think that a
shared syntax for both macros and functions calls is a flaw in the
syntax of Lisps, because you can't tell, just by looking at a form,
which expressions get ev
