Re: [pure-lang-users] system time

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Eddie Rucker wrote:
> I've been waiting for the special forms like in Q or macros like in C or Scheme to pop up any day now! I like the latter too 
> because that is what most people coming from C are already use to. 

Pure's macros will be hygienic, unlike C's. In fact they will just be
ordinary functions, except that they take their arguments as literals
(unevaluated) and are executed at compile time (thanks to the LLVM JIT).

I've been tossing around this idea ever since I implemented the constant
definitions (which already execute ordinary Pure expressions at compile
time). It will be an easy extension of that, much easier to implement
than Q's runtime special forms.

Q's special forms are nice because they unify macros and lazy data
structures, but they also incur significant runtime overhead. Pure
macros will give us the former without any runtime penalty, and the
latter can also be implemented using other techniques.

Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag