Julia macros does not work on text, but on the parsed AST. If the modified
syntax parses to something legally, you could do the transformation on the
AST, but you should have a really good reason for wanting to do that. The
syntax (for the user of your macro) would look something like:
@modify_julia_syntax begin
# code that should be modified
end
You can already use some ugly (slow performance) tricks from thenewphalls
<http://thenewphalls.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/understanding-object-oriented-programming-in-julia-part-1/>,
but then you are not getting any benefit from using Julia and should really
consider using Python instead.
Ivar
kl. 19:02:56 UTC+2 mandag 7. juli 2014 skrev christian keppenne følgende:
>
> Let's say I wanted to define an alternative syntax for some constructs
> like, for example,
> "debut; ... ; fin" as an alternative syntax for "begin; ... ; end" blocks
> or "<-" as an alternative form for the assignment "=". The first one
> would be easy to do with CPP and the second one with a tool like perl or
> sed. Could such substitutions also be done with a Julia macro that would
> act on the content of an entire file so that the code containing the
> alternative syntax would first be parsed and each occurence of "<-" would
> be replaced with an "=" and "debut; ... ; fin" blocks woulld be replaced
> with "begin; ... ; end" blocks?
>
> Another related question is could a Julia macro be written to mimic object
> oriented call syntax so that one could write. "a->f(b)" or "a.f(b)" as an
> alternative for "f(a, b) "?
> I apologize in advance for the triviality of my question. I have less
> than a week of Julia experience.
>
>
>
