[r6rs-discuss] macroexpand

[Dan Muresan]

> Back when I wrote PDP-8 assembly language, I routinely used self-modifying
> code to keep modules shorter than 128 words.  I can't do that any more,
> but I've learned to live without it.

That's not the same. Why don't you give up closures and continuations too
and learn to live without them? Because you lose tons of expressivity.

You can still accomplish the same things without self-modifying code. I
(and others) cannot, without macroexpand.

The fact that you have never needed macros that expand their arguments,
while me and Andre did, does not mean that you have achieved Zen. It means
that you haven't played as much with one of the things that makes Lisp
what it is -- programs that manipulate programs.

However, if you can write a portable user-space emulation of define-macro
/ macroexpand (that works at expansion time!), I'll shut up.


Dan Muresan
http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~muresan