I'm trying to move from Common Lisp to Chicken Scheme, and having plenty of problems.
My current problem is this: How can I write a macro (presumably using define-syntax?) that calls other macros?
For example, in Common Lisp I could do something like this:
(defmacro append-to (var value)
`(setf ,var (append ,var ,value)))
(defmacro something-else ()
(let ((values (list))
(append-to values '(1)))))
Whereas in Scheme, the equivalent code doesn't work:
(define-syntax append-to
(syntax-rules ()
((_ var value)
(set! var (append var value)))))
(define-syntax something-else
(syntax-rules ()
((_)
(let ((values (list)))
(append-to values '(1))))))
The append-to macro cannot be called from the something-else macro. I get an error saying the append-to "variable" is undefined.
According to all the information I've managed to glean from Google and other sources, macros are evaluated in a closed environment without access to other code. Essentially, nothing else exists - except built-in Scheme functions and macros - when the macro is evaluated. I have tried using er-macro-transformer, syntax-case (which is now deprecated in Chicken anyway) and even the procedural-macros module.
Surely the entire purpose of macros is that they are built upon other macros, to avoid repeating code. If macros must be written in isolation, they're pretty much useless, to my mind.
I have investigated other Scheme implementations, and had no more luck. Seems it simply cannot be done.
Can someone help me with this, please?
It looks like you're confusing expansion-time with run-time. The syntax-rules example you give will expand to the let+set, which means the append will happen at runtime.
syntax-rules simply rewrites input to given output, expanding macros until there's nothing more to expand. If you want to actually perform some computation at expansion time, the only way to do that is with a procedural macro (this is also what happens in your defmacro CL example).
In Scheme, evaluation levels are strictly separated (this makes separate compilation possible), so a procedure can use macros, but the macros themselves can't use the procedures (or macros) defined in the same piece of code. You can load procedures and macros from a module for use in procedural macros by using use-for-syntax. There's limited support for defining things to run at syntax expansion time by wrapping them in begin-for-syntax.
See for example this SO question or this discussion on the ikarus-users mailing list. Matthew Flatt's paper composable and compilable macros explains the theory behind this in more detail.
The "phase separation" thinking is relatively new in the Scheme world (note that the Flatt paper is from 2002), so you'll find quite a few people in the Scheme community who are still a bit confused about it. The reason it's "new" (even though Scheme has had macros for a long long time) is that procedural macros have only become part of the standard since R6RS (and reverted in R7RS because syntax-case is rather controversial), so the need to rigidly specify them hasn't been an issue until now. For more "traditional" Lispy implementations of Scheme, where compile-time and run-time are all mashed together, this was never an issue; you can just run code whenever.
To get back to your example, it works fine if you separate the phases correctly:
(begin-for-syntax
(define-syntax append-to
(ir-macro-transformer
(lambda (e i c)
(let ((var (cadr e))
(val (caddr e)))
`(set! ,var (append ,var ,val)))))) )
(define-syntax something-else
(ir-macro-transformer
(lambda (e i c)
(let ((vals (list 'print)))
(append-to vals '(1))
vals))))
(something-else) ; Expands to (print 1)
If you put the definition of append-to in a module of its own, and you use-for-syntax it, that should work as well. This will also allow you to use the same module both in the macros you define in a body of code as well as in the procedures, by simply requiring it both in a use and a use-for-syntax expression.
Related
In Lisp, a function's arguments are evaluated first before entering the function body. Macro arguments stay not evaluated.
But sometimes, one wants to inject code pieces stored in variables into a macro. This means evaluating the argument for the macro first, and then apply the macro-of-choice on this evaluated result.
One has to resort to
(eval `(macro ,arg))
To achieve this - but eval does not behave correctly in different environments.
The best thing would be, if one could do:
(apply macro (list arg))
or
(funcall macro arg)
But since the macro is not a function this doesn't work.
Is it possible to achieve something like this? - To circumvent that problem oder to make the macro available in the functions namespace?
Or am I missing some other ways to solve such problems?
I came to this question while trying to answer How to produce HTML from a list. but also in Generate TYPECASE with macro in common lisp, Evaluate arguments passed to a macro that generates functions in lisp, and How to convert a list to code/lambda in scheme?. But I always thought while answering them it would be good to have an apply or funcall-like function which can take macros.
It is not clear what you are trying to do, although it is almost certain that you are confused about something. In particular if you are calling eval inside macroexpansions then in almost all cases you are doing something both seriously wrong and seriously dangerous. I can't ever think of a case where I've wanted macros which expand to things including eval and I have written Lisp for a very very long time.
That being said, here is how you call the function associated with a macro, and why it is very seldom what you want to do.
Macros are simply functions whose domain and range is source code: they are compilers from a language to another language. It is perfectly possible to call the function associated with a macro, but what that function will return is source code, and what you will then need to do with that source code is evaluate it. If you want a function which deals with run-time data which is not source code, then you need that function, and you can't turn a macro into that function by some magic trick which seems to be what you want to do: that magic trick does not, and can not, exist.
So for instance if I have a macro
(defmacro with-x (&body forms)
`(let ((x 1))
,#forms))
Then I can call its macro function on a bit of source code:
> (funcall (macro-function 'with-x)
'(with-x (print "foo")) nil)
(let ((x 1)) (print "foo"))
But the result of this is another bit of source code: I need to compile or evaluate it, and nothing I can do will get around this.
Indeed in (almost?) all cases this is just the same as macroexpand-1):
> (macroexpand-1 '(with-x (print "foo")))
(let ((x 1)) (print "foo"))
t
And you can probably write macroexpand-1 in terms of macro-function:
(defun macroexpand-1/equivalent (form &optional (env nil))
(if (and (consp form)
(symbolp (first form))
(macro-function (first form)))
(values (funcall (macro-function (first form)) form env)
t)
(values form nil)))
So, if the result of calling a macro is source code, what do you do with that source code to get a result which is not source code? Well, you must evaluate it. And then, well, since the evaluator expands macros for you anyway, you might as well just write something like
(defun evaluate-with-x (code)
(funcall (compile nil `(lambda ()
(with-x ,#code)))))
So you didn't need to call the macro's function in any case. And this is not the magic trick which turns macros into functions dealing with data which is not source code: it is a terrible horror which is entirely made of exploding parts.
A concrete example: CL-WHO
It looks like this question might have its origins in this one and the underlying problem there is that that's not what CL-WHO does. In particular it is a confusion to think that something like CL-WHO is a tool for taking some kind of list and turning it into HTML. It's not: it's a tool for taking the source code of a language which is built on CL but includes a way of expressing HTML output mingled with CL code, and compiles it into CL code which will do the same thing. It happens to be the case that CL source code is expressed as lists & symbols, but CL-WHO isn't really about that: it's a compiler from, if you like, 'the CL-WHO language' to CL.
So, let's try the trick we tried above and see why it's a disaster:
(defun form->html/insane (form)
(funcall
(compile nil `(lambda ()
(with-html-output-to-string (,(make-symbol "O"))
,#form)))))
And you might, if you did not look at this too closely, think that this function does in fact do the magic trick:
> (form->html/insane '(:p ((:a :href "foo") "the foo")))
"<p></p><a href='foo'>the foo</a>"
But it doesn't. What happens if we call form->html/insane on this perfectly innocuous list:
(:p (uiop/run-program:run-program "rm -rf $HOME" :output t))
Hint: don't call form->html/insane on this list if you don't have very good backups.
CL-WHO is an implementation of a programming language which is a strict superset of CL: if you try to turn it into a function to turn lists into HTML you end up with something involving the same nuclear weapon you tinker with every time you call eval, except that nuclear weapon is hidden inside a locked cupboard where you can't see it. But it doesn't care about that: if you set it off it will still reduce everything within a few miles to radioactive ash and rubble.
So if you want a tool which will turn lists – lists which aren't source code – into HTML then write that tool. CL-WHO might have the guts of such a tool in its implemenentation, but you can't use it as it is.
And this is the same problem you face whenever you are trying to abuse macros this way: the result of calling a macro's function is Lisp source code, and to evaluate that source code you need eval or an equivalent of eval. And eval is not only not a terrible solution to almost any problem: it's also a nuclear weapon. There are, perhaps problems for which nuclear weapons are good solutions, but they are few and far between.
AND and OR are macros and since macros aren't first class in scheme/racket they cannot be passed as arguments to other functions. A partial solution is to use and-map or or-map. Is it possible to write a function that would take arbitrary macro and turn it into a function so that it can be passed as an argument to another function? Are there any languages that have first class macros?
In general, no. Consider that let is (or could be) implemented as a macro on top of lambda:
(let ((x 1))
(foo x))
could be a macro that expands to
((lambda (x) (foo x)) 1)
Now, what would it look like to convert let to a function? Clearly it is nonsense. What would its inputs be? Its return value?
Many macros will be like this. In fact, any macro that could be routinely turned into a function without losing any functionality is a bad macro! Such a macro should have been a function to begin with.
I agree with #amalloy. If something is written as a macro, it probably does something that functions can't do (e.g., introduce bindings, change evaluation order). So automatically converting arbitrary macro into a function is a really bad idea even if it is possible.
Is it possible to write a function that would take arbitrary macro and turn it into a function so that it can be passed as an argument to another function?
No, but it is somewhat doable to write a macro that would take some macro and turn it into a function.
#lang racket
(require (for-syntax racket/list))
(define-syntax (->proc stx)
(syntax-case stx ()
[(_ mac #:arity arity)
(with-syntax ([(args ...) (generate-temporaries (range (syntax-e #'arity)))])
#'(λ (args ...) (mac args ...)))]))
((->proc and #:arity 2) 42 12)
(apply (->proc and #:arity 2) '(#f 12))
((->proc and #:arity 2) #f (error 'not-short-circuit))
You might also be interested in identifier macro, which allows us to use an identifier as a macro in some context and function in another context. This could be used to create a first class and/or which short-circuits when it's used as a macro, but could be passed as a function value in non-transformer position.
On the topic of first class macro, take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fexpr. It's known to be a bad idea.
Not in the way you probably expect
To see why, here is a way of thinking about macros: A macro is a function which takes a bit of source code and turns it into another bit of source code: the expansion of the macro. In other words a macro is a function whose domain and range are source code.
Once the source code is fully expanded, then it's fed to either an evaluator or a compiler. Let's assume it's fed to a compiler because it makes the question easier to answer: a compiler itself is simply a function whose domain is source code and whose range is some sequence of instructions for a machine (which may or may not be a real machine) to execute. Those instructions might include things like 'call this function on these arguments'.
So, what you are asking is: can the 'this function' in 'call this function on these arguments' be some kind of macro? Well, yes, it could be, but whatever source code it is going to transform certainly can not be the source code of the program you are executing, because that is gone: all that's left is the sequence of instructions that was the return value of the compiler.
So you might say: OK, let's say we disallow compilers: can we do it now? Well, leaving aside that 'disallowing compilers' is kind of a serious limitation, this was, in fact, something that very old dialects of Lisp sort-of did, using a construct called a FEXPR, as mentioned in another answer. It's important to realise that FEXPRs existed because people had not yet invented macros. Pretty soon, people did invent macros, and although FEXPRs and macros coexisted for a while – mostly because people had written code which used FEXPRs which they wanted to keep running, and because writing macros was a serious pain before things like backquote existed – FEXPRs died out. And they died out because they were semantically horrible: even by the standards of 1960s Lisps they were semantically horrible.
Here's one small example of why FEXPRs are so horrible: Let's say I write this function in a language with FEXPRs:
(define (foo f g x)
(apply f (g x)))
Now: what happens when I call foo? In particular, what happens if f might be a FEXPR?. Well, the answer is that I can't compile foo at all: I have to wait until run-time and make some on-the-fly decision about what to do.
Of course this isn't what these old Lisps with FEXPRs probably did: they would just silently have assumed that f was a normal function (which they would have called an EXPR) and compiled accordingly (and yes, even very old Lisps had compilers). If you passed something which was a FEXPR you just lost: either the thing detected that, or more likely it fall over horribly or gave you some junk answer.
And this kind of horribleness is why macros were invented: macros provide a semantically sane approach to processing Lisp code which allows (eventually, this took a long time to actually happen) minor details like compilation being possible at all, code having reasonable semantics and compiled code having the same semantics as interpreted code. These are features people like in their languages, it turns out.
Incidentally, in both Racket and Common Lisp, macros are explicitly functions. In Racket they are functions which operate on special 'syntax' objects because that's how you get hygiene, but in Common Lisp, which is much less hygienic, they're just functions which operate on CL source code, where the source code is simply made up of lists, symbols &c.
Here's an example of this in Racket:
> (define foo (syntax-rules ()
[(_ x) x]))
> foo
#<procedure:foo>
OK, foo is now just an ordinary function. But it's a function whose domain & range are Racket source code: it expects a syntax object as an argument and returns another one:
> (foo 1)
; ?: bad syntax
; in: 1
; [,bt for context]
This is because 1 is not a syntax object.
> (foo #'(x 1))
#<syntax:readline-input:5:10 1>
> (syntax-e (foo #'(x 1)))
1
And in CL this is even easier to see: Here's a macro definition:
(defmacro foo (form) form)
And now I can get hold of the macro's function and call it on some CL source code:
> (macro-function 'foo)
#<Function foo 4060000B6C>
> (funcall (macro-function 'foo) '(x 1) nil)
1
In both Racket and CL, macros are, in fact, first-class (or, in the case of Racket: almost first-class, I think): they are functions which operate on source code, which itself is first-class: you can write Racket and CL programs which construct and manipulate source code in arbitrary ways: that's what macros are in these languages.
In the case of Racket I have said 'almost first-class', because I can't see a way, in Racket, to retrieve the function which sits behind a macro defined with define-syntax &c.
I've created something like this in Scheme, it's macro that return lambda that use eval to execute the macro:
(define-macro (macron m)
(let ((x (gensym)))
`(lambda (,x)
(eval `(,',m ,#,x)))))
Example usage:
;; normal eval
(define x (map (lambda (x)
(eval `(lambda ,#x)))
'(((x) (display x)) ((y) (+ y y)))))
;; using macron macro
(define x (map (macron lambda)
'(((x) (display x)) ((y) (+ y y)))))
and x in both cases is list of two functions.
another example:
(define-macro (+++ . args)
`(+ ,#args))
((macron +++) '(1 2 3))
While reading through Paul Graham's Essays, I've become more and more curious about Lisp.
In this article, he mentions that one of the most powerful features is that you can write programs that write other programs.
I couldn't find an intuitive explanation on his site or elsewhere. Is there some minimal Lisp program that shows an example of how this is done? Or, can you explain in words what this means exactly?
Lisp is homoiconic. Here is a function which build an s-expression representing a sum.
(defun makes(x) (list '+ x 2))
so (makes 5) evaluates to (+ 5 2) which is a valid s-expression. You could pass that to eval
There are more complex examples with Lisp macros. See also this. Read the section on Evaluation and Compilation of Common Lisp HyperSpec (also notice its compile, defmacro, eval forms). Be aware of multi-staged programming.
I strongly recommend reading SICP (it is freely downloadable) then Lisp In Small Pieces. You could also enjoy reading Gödel, Escher, Bach.... and J.Pitrat's blog on Bootstrapping Artificial Intelligence.
BTW, with C on POSIX, you might also code programs generating C code (or use GCCJIT or LLVM), compiling that generated code as a plugin, and dlopen-ing it.
While homoiconicity is the fundamental property that makes this easy, a good example of this in practice is the macro facility present in many lisps. Homoiconicity allows you to write lisp functions that take lisp source (represented as lists of lists) and do list manipulation operations on it to produce other lisp source. A macro is a plain lisp function for doing this which is installed into the compiler/evaluator of your lisp as an extension of the language's syntax. The macro gets called like a normal function, but instead of waiting until runtime the compiler passes the raw code of the macro's arguments to it. The macro is then responsible for returning some alternative code for the compiler to process in its place.
A simple example is the built-in when macro, used like so (assuming some variable x):
(when (evenp x)
(print "It's even!")
(* 5 x))
when is similar to the more fundamental if, but where if takes 3 sub-expressions (test, then-case, else-case) when takes the test and then an arbitrary number of expressions to run in the "then" case (it returns nil in the else case). To write this using if you need an explicit block (a progn in Common Lisp):
(if (evenp x)
(progn
(print "It's even!")
(* 5 x))
nil)
Translating the when version to the if version is some very simple list-manipluation:
(defun when->if (when-expression)
(list 'if
(second when-expression)
(append (list 'progn)
(rest (rest when-expression)))))
Although I'd probably use the list templating syntax and some shorter functions to get this:
(defun when->if (when-expression)
`(if ,(second when-expression) (progn ,#(cddr when-expression)) nil))
This gets called like so: (when->if (list 'when (list 'evenp 'x) ...)).
Now all we need to do is inform the compiler that when it sees an expression like (when ...) (actually I'm writing one for (my-when ...) to avoid clashing with the built-in version) it should use something like our when->if to turn it into code it understands. The actual macro syntax for this actually lets you take apart the expression/list ("destructure" it) as part of the arguments of the macro, so it ends up looking like this:
(defmacro my-when (test &body then-case-expressions)
`(if ,test (progn ,#then-case-expressions) nil))
Looks sorta like a regular function, except it's taking code and outputting other code. Now we can write (my-when (evenp x) ...) and everything works.
The lisp macro facility forms a major component of the expressive power of lisps- they allow you to mold the language to better suit your project and abstract away nearly any boilerplate. Macros can be as simple as when or complex enough to make a third-party OOP library feel like a first-class part of the language (in fact many lisps still implement OOP as a pure lisp library as opposed to a special component of the core compiler, not that you can tell from using them).
A good example are Lisp macros. They aren't evaluated, but instead they transform to the expressions within them. That is what makes them essentially programs that write program. They transform the expressions within them between compile-time and runtime. This means that you can essentially create your own syntax since a macro isn't actually evaluated. A good example would be this invalid common lisp form:
(backwards ("Hello world" nil format))
Clearly the syntax for the format function is backwards. BUT... we are passing it to a macro which isn't evaluated, so we will not get a backtrace error, because the macro isn't actually evaluated. Here is what our macro looks like:
(defmacro backwards (expr)
(reverse expr))
As you can see, we reverse the expression within the macro, which is why it becomes a standard Lisp form between compile-time and runtime. We have essentially altered the syntax of Lisp with a simple example. The call to the macro isn't evaluated, but is translated. A more complex example would be creating a web page in html:
(defmacro standard-page ((&key title href)&body body)
`(with-html-output-to-string (*standard-output* nil :prologue t :indent t)
(:html :lang "en"
(:head
(:meta :charset "utf-8")
(:title ,title)
(:link :rel "stylesheet"
:type "text/css"
:href ,href))
,#body)))
We can essentially create a macro, and the call to that macro will not be evaluated, but it will expand to valid lisp syntax, and that will be evaluated. If we look at the macro expansion we can see that the expansion is what is evaluated:
(pprint (macroexpand-1 '(standard-page (:title "Hello"
:href "my-styles.css")
(:h1 "Hello world"))))
Which expands to:
(WITH-HTML-OUTPUT-TO-STRING (*STANDARD-OUTPUT* NIL :PROLOGUE T :INDENT T)
(:HTML :LANG "en"
(:HEAD (:META :CHARSET "utf-8") (:TITLE "Hello")
(:LINK :REL "stylesheet" :TYPE "text/css" :HREF "my-styles.css"))
(:H1 "Hello world")))
This is why Paul Graham mentions that you can essentially write programs that write programs, and ViaWeb was essentially one big macro. A bunch of macros like this writing code that could write code that could write code...
In Guix there's a layer made of macros beautifying the creation and manipulation of srfi-9 records
The code is in guix/records.scm
The code is large and articulated
I thought to expand those macros to see their input and their output in order to have a feel of what they do
The thing is that even the standard vanilla srfi-9 records are macros around structures, in their own turn
So the macro expansion gives me a completely expanded code creating and manipulating structures.
I'd prefer to see the result of a single pass of macro expansion, to see what srfi-9 code the guix macros have produced
In Clojure there are macroexpand and macroexpand-1
macroexpand-1 does a single pass of macro expansion and macroexpand calls macroexpand-1 repeatedly until there are no more macors to expand in the forms being processed
You can see this here
Is there a similar option in Guile scheme ?
Am I missing any workflow trick, any tool, any library function or macro for dealing with this ?
Here is a simple version of macroexpand1:
#lang racket
(define-syntax (expand1 stx)
(syntax-case stx ()
[(_expand1 form)
(syntax-case #'form ()
[(id . more)
(identifier? #'id)
(let ([transformer (syntax-local-value #'id)])
(with-syntax ([expansion (transformer #'form)])
#''expansion))]
[_
#''form])]))
(expand1 (or 1 2 3))
The output is:
'(let ((or-part 1)) (if or-part or-part (or 2 3)))
Note that Clojure's macro expansion algorithm is more simplistic than what's used in most Scheme implementation.
For an explanation psyntax aka portable syntax-case look in the book "Beautiful Code" for the chapter by Dybvig.
https://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/bc-syntax-case.pdf
Ok, in the NEWS file there's this excerpt
** Removed function: `macroexpand-1'
It is unclear how to implement `macroexpand-1' with syntax-case,
though PLT Scheme does prove that it is possible.
I don' t know what the problem is between macroexpand-1 and syntax-case and I don't know what Racket is doing about it
But at least now I know that macroexpand-1 has been explicitly removed
I'm exploring Scheme macros, but I've been unable to find a portable way of writing anaphoric macros.
I'm trying to write an each-it macro, such that this code:
(each-it (list 1 2 3)
(display it))
Expands to this:
(for-each (lambda (it)
(display it))
(list 1 2 3))
I've written a macro with syntax-rules, but this gives me an error about an undefined identifier when I try to use it.
(define-syntax each-it
(syntax-rules ()
((each-it lst body)
(for-each (lambda (it) body)
lst))))
This SO question mentions define-syntax-parameter, which seems to be Racket only. This blog post gives some Scheme code samples, but the code samples don't run in DrRacket in R5RS mode (I think it's the square brackets?).
R4RS has an interesting macro appendix but it is not present in R5RS and I don't know if I can depend on it.
Can I write my each-it macro in a completely portable way? If not, what are the most widely available macro system features for writing my macro?
This should be portable, at least in R6RS:
(define-syntax each-it
(lambda (x)
(syntax-case x ()
((_ lst body)
(with-syntax ((it (datum->syntax x 'it)))
#'(for-each (lambda (it) body) lst))))))
Yes, you can write it in a portable way assuming that R6RS is portable enough for you. (The same cannot be said on R7RS, which currently has nothing more than just syntax-rules, and it's unclear what will be included in the large language, or when it will happen.) See uselpa's for how to do that.
So why am I writing another answer? Because actually doing that is going to be a bad idea. A bad idea not in some vague academic sense that doesn't matter for most real world code -- bad in a sense that is likely to bite you later on. I know that "paper" makes it look intimidating, but read at least the first two sections of the paper mentioned in the other SO question you've seen. Specifically, Section 1.2 shows the problem you'll be running against. Then, Section 2 shows how to do it "properly", in a way that makes it tedious to write macros that expand to uses of your macro. At this point, it will be appealing to take the "just keep it hygienic", but at the end of Section 2 you'll see why that's not working either.
The bottom line, IMO, is to just not do it unless you have syntax parameters or something similar. Maybe the only exception to that (which might be your case) is when the macro is something that you intend to use yourself, and you will never provide it to others.