Francogrex wrote:
> Hi, I would like to ask two simple questions to you guys who have much
> more expertise in lisp than I do.
> 1) I'm new to Lisp and at work I was explaining that what I find
> beautiful in Lisp (all lisp is beautiful but what I find especially
> beautiful) is the concept of macros that make of lisp a programmable
> programming language. But then some guys from the stats department who
> are SAS addicts (those who don't know how to programm but use only
> canned procedures) said: "yeah, that's nothing new or special, you
> have macros in SAS also"... I was annoyed because I knew that somehow
> the concept of macros is SAS (or other real programming languages) is
> quite different from the macros in lisp but couldn't explain really
> how, didn't have enough knowledge of other languages. Can someone tell
> me how macros in Lisp are different?
Not much. This is different from what others said cuz I did your
homework for you and looked up SAS, which we could not be expected to
know (Bad Franco! Bad!):
"These statements probably look familiar because there are parallel
statements in standard SAS code, but don�t confuse these with their
standard counterparts. These statements can only be used inside a macro,
and can perform actions that would be completely impossible for standard
SAS statements. With %IF, actions can include other macro statements or
even complete DATA and PROC steps. Remember, the macro statements won�t
appear in the standard SAS code generated by the macro processor because
you are writing a program that writes a program."
http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/sugi29/243-29.pdf, page 9
So just hi five them and say, Cool! Macros rock, right? Lisp and SAS are
awesome!
hth, kenny
--
http://smuglispweeny.blogspot.com/
http://www.theoryyalgebra.com/
ECLM rant:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1331906677993764413&hl=en
ECLM talk:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9173722505157942928&q=&hl=en