On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Patrick Burns wrote:
>
>
> Simon Fear wrote:
>
> >
> >3. I have a very old brown-covered book describing macros in
> >the S language (version 1? I don't have it to hand to check).
> >When and why did they disappear? (Hoping John Chambers
> >is reading this.)
> >
> >
> Pretty much the same reason that you don't grind your flour
> by hand with a stone.
Well, many very civilised languages have macros (not the #define things,
but ones that work on parsed expressions). Lazy evaluation lets us
do most of the same things, but not all. If we had a compiler there
would probably be more interest in macros, as then there would be a
distinction between compile-time and run-time evaluation.
-thomas
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