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5 points by absz 5817 days ago | link | parent

They're very very different things, but they have two commonalities. The first is a uniformity: in Lisp, you have data-code correspondence and everything returning a value; in Smalltalk you have everything being an object. The second is syntactic simplicity: Lisp (pretty much) only has its function/macros application with parentheses, (so (all your) 'code (looks like (this))). Smalltalk (pretty much) only has objects and message sending, so all:(your code) looksLike:this.

In fact, given Smalltalk's syntactic uniformity (if, while, etc. are implemented as methods on booleans, etc.), I've occasionally wondered if one could write a Smalltalk with macros. Does anyone know if this exists or why it wouldn't work?



3 points by gruseom 5816 days ago | link

There's a longstanding debate between the two communities about whether or not macros provide any meaningful benefits that Smalltalk blocks don't. (The archives of the LL1 mailing list contain a gold mine of posts on this.) In general, I doubt that most Smalltalk hackers would be very interested in macros in Smalltalk; they'd probably see it as out of sync with the spirit of the language. (Compare this to how Lisp hackers react to the inevitable newbie attempts to "fix" Lisp by removing parentheses or making it infix.)

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2 points by jmatt 5817 days ago | link

Great point about uniformity.

In lisp everything is a list - even code.

In smalltalk everything is an object - even code.

I think macros in smalltalk are plausible. I have nothing to back that up. I am definitely not a smalltalk hacker. I think that smalltalk can solve the same problems that macros solve just through a different approach.

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1 point by schtog 5817 days ago | link

yes that was kind of my thought. but i dont know enough about either language yet.

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