> If Hoon did have macros, however, they would be inherently hygienic, without anything like a gensym
Everything we know about hygienic macros is mainly the result of research in Lisp dialects.
Everything that has syntax has macros. Just not necessarily user definable macros.
Syntax takes some clumps of symbols and converts them to some other symbols. When that is user-defined, we call it a macros; when it is hard-wired in some parser, we call it a grammar production.
"You don't need macros" is reminiscent of "why would you need more than 640 Kb of RAM?"
If you don't need macros, it means that the language syntax has provided exactly the right set of hard-coded ones in the parser.
If that is true, why are there different languages without macros with different syntaxes? And which one is right?
Everything we know about hygienic macros is mainly the result of research in Lisp dialects.
Everything that has syntax has macros. Just not necessarily user definable macros.
Syntax takes some clumps of symbols and converts them to some other symbols. When that is user-defined, we call it a macros; when it is hard-wired in some parser, we call it a grammar production.
"You don't need macros" is reminiscent of "why would you need more than 640 Kb of RAM?"
If you don't need macros, it means that the language syntax has provided exactly the right set of hard-coded ones in the parser.
If that is true, why are there different languages without macros with different syntaxes? And which one is right?