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Re: syntax taste: use of unquote in macros
From: |
Ludovic Courtès |
Subject: |
Re: syntax taste: use of unquote in macros |
Date: |
Tue, 31 Mar 2020 18:56:17 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/26.3 (gnu/linux) |
Hi Matt,
Matt Wette <address@hidden> skribis:
> I'm not sure if you know about this, but there is a discrepancy in the
> way some folks define macros to use unquote (aka ,). For example,
>
>> (use-modules (system base pmatch))
>> (pmatch '(foo "bar") ((foo ,val) (write val) (newline)))
> => "bar"
>
>> (use-modules (ice-9 match))
>> (match '(foo "bar") (`(foo ,val) (write val) (newline)))
> => "bar"
>
> Note the difference in the use of quasiquote (aka `) in the pattern
> for (foo ,val): match syntax uses it, pmatch does not.
> In Scheme, quasiquote and unquote always come together.
>
> Is pmatch syntax in bad taste? I'm looking for opinions.
It really depends on what you’re going to use the pattern matcher for.
For ‘sxml-match’, it’s more convenient to have literals be the default
because there are usually more literals than variables, as in:
(sxml-match x
((album (@ (title ,t)) (catalog (num ,n) (fmt ,f)) ...)
`(ul (li ,t)
(li (b ,n) (i ,f)) ...)))
In more general cases, I prefer the (ice-9 match) style because patterns
typically have more variables than literals.
In one case, I found myself implementing pmatch-style quoting on top of
(ice-9 match) so I would have the best of both worlds:
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/installer/tests.scm#n84
:-)
Ludo’.