Re: macros and the lexical environment

[Dmitry Gutov]

Nic Ferrier <address@hidden> writes:
> I decided that it would be better to expand the format string into a
> list of variable references. But that doesn't work well unless the
> string is static, using a reference for the format string doesn't work
> because it's not available at compile time:
>
>   (let ((v 42)
>         (a "hello world")
>         (template "${a} - the answer is ${v}"))
>      (s-lex-format template))
>
> will fail to expand.

Let me point out that this also is not supported in all languages that I
know that support this kind of string interpolation natively (i.e. Ruby
and CoffeScript). And for dynamically generated templates, you'll always
have `format'.

> But what I'm really asking is, isn't this quite a useful thing to want
> to do? get at the current environment state? the interpreter must know
> the environment state. Could it be exposed to macros at compile time?

Somewhat relatedly, I'd really like to see `debug' and `edebug' support
local variable evaluation in lexical scoping environment. Apparently,
it's rather hard to implement.