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Subject: Re: Reference Counting (was Searching Method for Incremental Garbage Collection)
References: <19941203T221402Z.enag@naggum.no> <D0AnFE.MII@research.att.com> <LGM.94Dec5075553@polaris.ih.att.com> <D0CLt9.6K3@research.att.com> <BUFF.94Dec15103904@pravda.world> <19941215T204909Z.enag@naggum.no>
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In article <19941215T204909Z.enag@naggum.no> erik@naggum.no "Erik Naggum" writes:

> dismisses macros, or what I understand to be macros, anyway: "Perhaps a
> Lispa advocate would counter that it isn't difficult to customize the Lisp
> syntax to whatever one desires.  My experience is that this isn't a good
> idea, because tools like the debugger operate on a more canonical
> representation so it is best to be familiar with your program in "standard"
> Common Lisp.  It is also to the benefit of other readers not to use a
> strange syntax."  it may seem that the author has failed to do the simplest

There's a simple solution: document the macros and treat them as
additions to the language. Even C programmers do that! How else
can you use tools like lex, yacc, or embedded SQL? Someone had to
document these tools.

Forth, Lisp, and even Smalltalk programmers can look at the language
system they use for programming in a slightly different way, by seeing
that the system itself is a program written in the language it compiles.
(See PJ Brown's book Writing Interactive Language Compilers and
Interpreters for a definition of "compiler" or "interpreter".)

I often suspect that mistakes like these could be unfamiliarity
with compiler theory.
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