[Gnu-arch-users] Re: Tla spork

[Stefan Monnier]

> I'd adventure to say that it's easier to understand what happens
> to program structure if you already `see' it in the regular way
> of S-expressions. Not that you couldn't represent Perl or Python
> programs as syntax trees -- but the mental gap from the program
> as you see it to the AST is wider --> no useful macro preprocessors.

There's a "lisp-macros for Java" system.  The way you write the macro is
that you match against patterns, where the patterns have the same shape as
the Java code: internally its all abstract parse trees, but there's no need
to present the bastract syntax tree in any other textual form than the
standard one.
But yes, it's more work, just like it's more work to write the Java parser.


        Stefan