Re: [Scheme-reports] auxiliary syntax

[Alex Shinn <alexshinn@x>]

On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 12:06 AM, Eli Barzilay <eli@x> wrote:

Just now, Alex Shinn wrote:

> It's equivalent to writing a macro which can parse and optimize
> literal PCRE regex strings,

Absolutely, but that doesn't bother me because with the above `let' I
don't expect whatever to affect the meaning of a "foo+bar" string.

[... general discussion of why strings are superior to sexps ...]

I never thought I'd have to explain this on a Scheme or Lisp

related list, but the advantages of sexps are:

  1. You don't need a parser.

      - Faster development time for new DSLs because you're

        not writing a parser.

      - Smaller executable size (the PCRE parser is by far the

        largest part of irregex).

      - Faster - parsing moved from runtime to compile time

      - Safer - no parse errors at runtime

  2. Easier to learn

      - Programmers don't have to learn a whole new parser

        syntax, they just learn the names and semantics.

  3. Easier to handle with existing Scheme tools.

      - Notably syntax-rules _can_ walk this statically if the

        bindings are the same.

Sexps are hands-down superior.  Personally I have no

trouble remembering that within the SRE syntax the bindings

never change - actually it would be impossible to read if

the bindings changed, because there are so many and because

I don't think of it as Scheme to begin with.  You can still

have escapes (unquote) into Scheme code and preserve

hygiene there.

-- 

Alex

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