Duane Rettig  <duane@franz.com> wrote:
+---------------
| ... most programming languages have completely ignored the concept
| of treating code as data.  Only assembler languages and some lisp-like
| languages support the concept.
...
| An example:  What is the real difference between expanding a macro
| in C and in Common Lisp?  Answer:  In C, the compiler does all of
| the work; the resulting expanded code is in the form of text, and
| there is no run-time possibility of modification of the code.
| In other words, the code is treated as code, and never data.
+---------------

Another similarity between Lisp & *older* assemblers such as MACRO-10
on the PDP-10 (not the brain-dead modern assemblers that are little more
than backends for C) is that they had extensive [I'd say "Turing-complete",
except for the expected flamage!] programmability during the expansion
process. MACRO-10 was especially nice, since you could store "state" in
assembly-time variables *and* mutate it later. You could do arithmetic,
do numerically-controlled loops, loops over arguments, loops over
*characters* of arguments, unfold nested structure in arguments,
convert numbers to string, contruct new assembly-time variables by
concatenation, and then store into and mutate *those*, etc.

I think I have written here before about some macros I used circa 1971
(in the FOCAL-10 interpreter, a port of PDP-8 FOCAL/F to the PDP-10)
to incrementally declare table-lookup "bit strips" for lexical parsing,
then drop the filled-in packed tables at the end of the program.

Yes, Lisp macros are nicer still (the "bit strip" stuff would be trivial),
but those older assemblers *were* something to write home about...  ;-}  ;-}


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock, 8L-846		rpw3@sgi.com
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