[bitc-dev] DISCUSS: To macro or not to macro?

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 19:09 +0000, Eric Rannaud wrote:
> BTW, does BitC have any concept of 'volatile'?

Not at the moment, and that is something that needs to be addressed.

Volatile is a very strange semantic beastie, but it's otherwise just a
type qualifier.

> > The problem I see with doing this sort of thing in the macro system is
> > that you lose the checking advantages that you can obtain if you keep
> > this sort of thing type-able.
> 
> The best of both worlds would be to somehow give macros the ability to
> validate their arguments in a more abstract way than going through the
> AST by hand.

So now you want the macro transformer to be able to invoke the type
checker in context, and perhaps also the unifier. And I think I agree,
but surely you see that the complexity of the compiler needed to support
this type of macro preprocessor is rapidly expanding...


shap