Re: and-let* is not composable?

[Ian Price]

Ian Price <address@hidden> writes:

> The problem is one that occurs when hygienic and non-hygienic macros are
> mixed. Here, and-let* is the non-hygienic one. Basically, in a hygienic
> macro, you carry around a bunch of context to allow you to refer to the
> right variable names. Then defmacro comes along, strips all that away,
> and uses the raw symbol names.
>
> We can fix and-let* to be hygienic, that's pretty easy, but I'm not sure
> what you can do about this in general. It's not like you can pass in the
> gensymed name, because that will break the way people who for some
> reason still right defmacros expect them to work.
>
> Dunno, maybe I'm just missing some insight here.

This discussion came up on #scheme yesterday, and Eli Barzilay mentioned
that Racket tries to be more clever with its legacy defmacro by keeping
a hash associating input sexps with their syntax objects.

This is in no way a silver bullet, but for many macros, this is liable
to work out really nicely. An example implementation is below, though I
have a few notes indicating things needing fixed.

(define-syntax define-macro
  (lambda (x)
    "Define a defmacro."
    (syntax-case x ()
      ((_ (macro . args) doc body1 body ...)
       (string? (syntax->datum #'doc))
       #'(define-macro macro doc (lambda args body1 body ...)))
      ((_ (macro . args) body ...)
       #'(define-macro macro #f (lambda args body ...)))
      ((_ macro transformer)
       #'(define-macro macro #f transformer))
      ((_ macro doc transformer)
       (or (string? (syntax->datum #'doc))
           (not (syntax->datum #'doc)))
       #'(define-syntax macro
           (lambda (y)
             (define (recontextualize form context default)
               (define (walk x)
                 ;; is there any possibility of a circular syntax object?
                 (cond ((hashv-ref context x) => (lambda (x) x))
                       ((pair? x)
                        (cons (walk (car x))
                              (walk (cdr x))))
                       ((vector? x)
                        (vector-map walk x))
                       ((symbol? x)
                        (datum->syntax default x))
                       (else x)))
               (walk form))
             (define (build-context form stx-form)
               (define ctx (make-hash-table))
               (define (walk x y)
                 (hashv-set! ctx x y)
                 ;; is there any possibility of a circular syntax object?
                 (cond ((pair? x)
                        (walk (car x) (car (syntax-e y)))
                        (walk (cdr x) (cdr (syntax-e y))))
                       ((vector? x)
                        (vector-for-each2 walk x (syntax-e y)))
                       ;; Any other types needing handled? 
                       ))
               (walk form stx-form)
               ctx)
             (define (vector-for-each2 f v1 v2)
               (define len (vector-length v1))
               (define v* (make-vector len))
               (let loop ((i 0))
                 (unless (= i len)
                   (vector-set! v* i (f (vector-ref v1 i) (vector-ref v2 i)))
                   (loop (+ i 1))))
               v*)
             (define (vector-map f v)
               (define len (vector-length v))
               (define v* (make-vector len))
               (let loop ((i 0))
                 (unless (= i len)
                   (vector-set! v* i (f (vector-ref v i)))
                   (loop (+ i 1))))
               v*)
             (define (syntax-e obj)
               (syntax-case obj ()
                 [(first . rest)
                  (cons #'first #'rest)]
                 [#(value (... ...))
                  (apply vector #'(value (... ...)))]
                 [a (syntax->datum #'a)]))
             doc ;; FIXME: may not be a docstring, and so would fail above
             #((macro-type . defmacro)
               (defmacro-args args))
             (syntax-case y ()
               ((_ . args)
                (let* ((v (syntax->datum #'args))
                       (ctx (build-context v #'args)))
                  (recontextualize (apply transformer v) ctx y))))))))))

This version of define-macro still fails on the original macros as
posted by Panicz Maciej Godek, but gives the "right" result using stis's
ck macro version.

At 2:30am, I'm not liable to get to the bottom of why till tomorrow, but
I think doing something like this is a positive step.

-- 
Ian Price -- shift-reset.com

"Programming is like pinball. The reward for doing it well is
the opportunity to do it again" - from "The Wizardy Compiled"