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by yetanotheruser
3051 days ago
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I'm still wrapping my head around macros, but I have
been able to come up with a couple use cases that I quickly realized were already covered by existing macros, the most recent one being a less flexible -> macro. Anyways, I kept reading places that lisp macros and c macros were completely distinct, which seems untrue after a couple years of trying clojure. |
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They're similar in that they're both compile-time functions that generate code, but they're very different in practice, because C macros are written in a text substitution language that knows virtually nothing about C, which naturally makes writing even simple macros very error-prone. Lisp macros, on the other hand, are written in plain old Lisp and receive regular Lisp data structures that you can use the whole language to operate on.
A lot of people learn from C that macros are very difficult to get right, so it's important when they move to Lisp that they give them a second look, because Lisp is a much more capable language for code transformation than cpp.