It's easy to write a macro that takes a static literal string and makes a 
variable out of it.

It's much harder (maybe impossible) to write a macro that takes in a variable 
that happens to be bound to a string value and to make a variable out of the 
value you happen to have stored in that variable.

Another way to put it: macros don't exist inside of the world of values -- they 
only live in the world of syntax.

Could you get a similar (and cleaner) effect by populating a Dict instead?

 -- John

On Dec 17, 2014, at 5:37 AM, Zeta Convex <[email protected]> wrote:

> I want to be able to write:
>     @makevar("life", 42)
> which will expand to
>    life = 42
> How do I do this?
> 
> Why do I want to do it? Because it would be cool to have a feature like in 
> Octave where I could load an HDF5 file, and it automatically sets the 
> variables from the file.

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