Re: I really like Ioke. How can I help?

[Ola Bini <ola.bini@gmail.com>]

Carlos Villela wrote:
> > Especially starting to think about
> >
> >     
> This is possibly off-topic, but another thing that's tricky to get my
> head around are the subtleties between macro, dmacro, lecro, lecrox,
> fn and fnx. This might just be me being unused to the Great LISP Way,
> but I reckon if the idea is making Ioke look and feel like a super
> powerful Ruby, these gotchas have to be well explained or more obvious
> in the code.
>
>   
Yep, definitely. It's kinda subtle. And you haven't even mentioned 
syntax ... =)

I'll explain it more in the guide for the next release but short:

macro - has a receiver, like a method, but takes unevaluated arguments 
that are available to the macro
lecro   - has no receiver, instead is lexically scoped, otherwise works 
like a macro
lecrox - like a lecro, but isn't activatable
fn       - like a method that is lexically scoped (so it's not executed 
in the context of a receiver). it isn't activatable.
fnx     - like fn, but is activatable
syntax- something that should return a message chain. the call to syntax 
will be replaced by the message chain returned.
dmacro - a syntax to make macros that have destructuring of arguments.
dlecro   - destructuring for lecros
dlecrox - like dlecro, but will not be activatable.

some nice methods to keep in mind when working with message chains:
'    - returns an unevaluated message chain
`   - wraps an object in a message
''   - returns an unevaluated message chain, except for the places where 
` is encountered, where it will splice in stuff. take a look at the 
implementation of DefaultBehavior Definitions generateMatchMethod in 
A10_defaultBehavior.ik for an example of how it's generally used.

Cheers

--
Ola Bini (http://olabini.com) 
JRuby Core Developer
Developer, ThoughtWorks Studios (http://studios.thoughtworks.com)
Practical JRuby on Rails (http://apress.com/book/view/9781590598818)

"Yields falsehood when quined" yields falsehood when quined.