Anaphora Macros worth 'stealing' for reuse on ChrysaLisp? about chrysalisp HOT 10 CLOSED

in my experience, a reasonably self-restrained use of anaphoric macros makes the code more readable.

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I also learnt from looking at (aand) that I need to fix the (and) and (or) macros in ChrysaLisp to work with 0 paramaters ! So thanks for that.

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I'd have to understand what it was first ;)

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See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphoric_macro :)

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And also:
http://common-lisp.net/project/anaphora/

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As well as here: https://common-lisp.net/project/anaphora/anaphora.html

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OK, yes I can see the benefit to having some of these macros around. But I also have some reservations, in part due to how ChrysaLisp does things, and in part due to my own personal bias.

I clearly already have source where I regularly need to keep the result of the test (or part of it) around for later use if the test turns out to be true, and I find myself doing things like:

(if (defq it (...))
(do-somthing-that-needs-it ...))

Most often in (cond) statements. And yes it's a bit of a pain, so would be nice to have a generic way of doing this.

However, I have never used (let), despite it being in the boot.inc file ! (boo, hiss, from the scope purists..) and tend to use (defq it) so as not to push another scope, and suffer the penalty of slowing access to variables by another scope (we are talking small overhead here, but there is some).

In the (acond) case you are also making every clause take the extra hit for a (let) even if only one or a few clauses make use of the convenient 'it' within that clause ?

So I feel a little conflicted on the use of these things. But don't object to them either as they are rather convenient.

As they are something a user can decide to use or not, with I would hope understanding the consequences of using them, I think it would be worth providing some of them.

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So I feel a little conflicted on the use of these things.

I feel the same way, and it seems that @tokenrove, @nikodemus, @attila-lendvai, @Ferada, @brianqq, @noctuid et al. (Couldn't find everyone's Github handle — sorry :)) also feel that way:

https://common-lisp.net/project/anaphora/anaphora.html

Extensive use of anaphoric macros is not good style, and probably makes you go blind as well — there's a reason why Anaphora claims to be from Hell.

Hence the question mark in the issue title. :)

I also learnt from looking at (aand) that I need to fix the (and) and (or) macros in ChrysaLisp to work with 0 paramaters ! So thanks for that.

Glad to hear that!

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Oh btw. — you might like this book by Paul Graham, made available by @daviddrysdale:

http://www.lurklurk.org/onlisp/onlisp.html

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I moved the anaphoric file over to class/lisp/anaphoric.inc. If folks want to include them and use them or add more of them, that's where they live.

Thanks.

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