JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science 16(2): 271-295, doi: 10.3217/jucs-016-02-0271
Embedding Hygiene-Compatible Macros in an Unhygienic Macro System
expand article infoPascal Costanza‡, Theo D Hondt‡
‡ Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussel, Belgium

Corresponding author: Pascal Costanza ( pascal.costanza@vub.ac.be )

© Pascal Costanza, Theo Hondt.
This article is freely available under the J.UCS Open Content License.
Citation: Costanza P, Hondt TD (2010) Embedding Hygiene-Compatible Macros in an Unhygienic Macro System. JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science 16(2): 271-295. https://doi.org/10.3217/jucs-016-02-0271
Open Access
Abstract
It is known that the essential ingredients of a Lisp-style unhygienic macro system can be expressed in terms of advanced hygienic macro systems. We show that the reverse is also true: We present a model of a core unhygienic macro system, on top of which a hygiene-compatible macro system can be built, without changing the internals of the core macro system and without using a code walker. To achieve this, the internal representation of source code as Lisp s-expressions does not need to be changed. The major discovery is the fact that symbol macros can be used in conjunction with local macro environments to bootstrap a hygiene-compatible macro system. We also discuss a proof-of-concept implementation in Common Lisp and give historical notes.
Keywords
hygiene-compatible macro systems, scheme, common Lisp