How useful are Lisp macros?

Posted by compman on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by compman
Published on 2011-12-13T21:24:46Z Indexed on 2012/06/04 22:46 UTC
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lisp

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Scheme

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macros

Common Lisp allows you to write macros that do whatever source transformation you want.

Scheme gives you a hygienic pattern-matching system that lets you perform transformations as well. How useful are macros in practice? Paul Graham said in Beating the Averages that:

The source code of the Viaweb editor was probably about 20-25% macros.

What sorts of things do people actually end up doing with macros?

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