> Someone else wrote that syntax and you benefit from it, just like you benefit from existing macros in a Lisp.
Are you following the discussion? The whole discussion arose from somehow macros make up for non-existence of libraries in Racket. Someone else wrote all those libraries for popular languages and I benefit from those existing libraries. Macros do fuck all if I have to wrap them myself. And even if I have to, most of the times it will be way simpler to wrap it in Python/Ruby.
You wrote a novella on your hypothetical macro use cases. I wrote I know what macros are. I don't know why you are throwing that at me.
> If Python had macros, Python 2 to 3 migration would be a non-issue. It wouldn't be a topic of discussion that non-Python-programmers know about.
This is what I mean when I say macros are a meme.
No, it won't have helped, at all. The changes in python 3 break the existing python 2 code.
> For example, this no longer works: k = d.keys(); k.sort(). Use k = sorted(d) instead (this works in Python 2.5 too and is just as efficient).
> The ordering comparison operators (<, <=, >=, >) raise a TypeError exception when the operands don’t have a meaningful natural ordering
> builtin.sorted() and list.sort() no longer accept the cmp argument providing a comparison function.
> The biggest difference with the 2.x situation is that any attempt to mix text and data in Python 3.0 raises TypeError, whereas if you were to mix Unicode and 8-bit strings in Python 2.x, it would work if the 8-bit string happened to contain only 7-bit (ASCII) bytes, but you would get UnicodeDecodeError if it contained non-ASCII values.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
Are you following the discussion? The whole discussion arose from somehow macros make up for non-existence of libraries in Racket. Someone else wrote all those libraries for popular languages and I benefit from those existing libraries. Macros do fuck all if I have to wrap them myself. And even if I have to, most of the times it will be way simpler to wrap it in Python/Ruby.
You wrote a novella on your hypothetical macro use cases. I wrote I know what macros are. I don't know why you are throwing that at me.
> If Python had macros, Python 2 to 3 migration would be a non-issue. It wouldn't be a topic of discussion that non-Python-programmers know about.
This is what I mean when I say macros are a meme.
No, it won't have helped, at all. The changes in python 3 break the existing python 2 code.
> For example, this no longer works: k = d.keys(); k.sort(). Use k = sorted(d) instead (this works in Python 2.5 too and is just as efficient).
> The ordering comparison operators (<, <=, >=, >) raise a TypeError exception when the operands don’t have a meaningful natural ordering
> builtin.sorted() and list.sort() no longer accept the cmp argument providing a comparison function.
> The biggest difference with the 2.x situation is that any attempt to mix text and data in Python 3.0 raises TypeError, whereas if you were to mix Unicode and 8-bit strings in Python 2.x, it would work if the 8-bit string happened to contain only 7-bit (ASCII) bytes, but you would get UnicodeDecodeError if it contained non-ASCII values.
I could go on, but you get the idea.