chaitanyagupta

Reader Macros in Common Lisp

This post also appears on lisper.in.

Reader macros are perhaps not as famous as ordinary macros. While macros are a great way to create your own DSL, reader macros provide even greater flexibility by allowing you to create entirely new syntax on top of Lisp.

Paul Graham explains them very well in [On Lisp][] (Chapter 17, Read-Macros):

The three big moments in a Lisp expression's life are read-time, compile-time, and runtime. Functions are in control at runtime. Macros give us a chance to perform transformations on programs at compile-time. ...read-macros... do their work at read-time.

llllllllll

"""Example usage:

In [1]: !cat ayy.s
        .text
        .global _start
        .type	_start, @function
_start:
        movq    $10, %rdx

        pushw   $10

gaearon

Note:

When this guide is more complete, the plan is to move it into Prepack documentation.
For now I put it out as a gist to gather initial feedback.

A Gentle Introduction to Prepack (Part 1)

If you're building JavaScript apps, you might already be familiar with some tools that compile JavaScript code to equivalent JavaScript code:

• Babel lets you use newer JavaScript language features, and outputs equivalent code that targets older JavaScript engines.