This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 30 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 30 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
> From: bear <bear@xxxxxxxxx> > On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, Al Petrofsky wrote: > >> From: bear <bear@xxxxxxxxx> > >> > >> Can't we just use a syntax definition and say > >> > >> (Comment ...) > >> > >> "expands" to nothing? No. With (define-syntax comment (syntax-rules () ((_ . x) (begin)))), comments would only be usable at top-level and at the start of bodies. With (define-syntax comment (syntax-rules () ((_ . x) 'comment))), comments would be legal in any expression context, but would not work between internal definitions. Neither version can be used for commenting out parts of a literal inside a quote, or some arguments in a procedure call, or a few binding clauses of a let, etc.. > I'm not getting it. How is this different from > > (define stuff > '(foo > bar > (Comment FIXME: These two cause crashes for some reason -APP > baz > quux > ) > zork)) For starters, that doesn't work because -app is an invalid token. Secondly, (quote (foo bar)) evaluates to (foo bar), regardless of foo's syntax binding: (quote (lambda 7)) => (lambda 7). In general, special forms are passed their argument data as-is, rather than being passed some evaluated or otherwise processed form of the data. That's the point of special forms. > I bring this up because anything that requires new tokens > to be recognized by the lexer is inherently nonportable. > It is either "there" or "not there" in a given system, and > there's not much you can do about it. Right. That's why the lisp standard includes reader macros as well as expression macros. (In this case, we're actually requiring a new intertoken space rather than a new token, but that doesn't affect your point.) -al