[Gcl-devel] Re: macros!

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings!

Just a quick note that I have locally a version which does all the
macroexpansion up front in t1defun.  Paradoxically, it increases
compile time from 8:30m to 9:05m, mostly (I believe), due to its
interference with certain type inferencing.

This is the so-called 'or-of-death' problem, whereby a simple form

(unless (or a b) (foo))

in which both a and b are known to be nil when executing (foo),
becomes:

(if (not (let ((g a)) (if g g b))) (foo))

unraveling the latter to yield the same info as the former is
something I'm thinking about at present.

In any case, recursively-cmp-macroexpand works at least on all GCL and
maxima code.

There is a bit of an oddity in the current strategy, as the compiler
macros in some cases will expand to different results depending on the
local optimization setting.  This is not passed in an env variable to
the macroexpander, but rather in bindings to special variables
governing the scope of the optimization declaration.  I've never
really understood how the environment is supposed to work in
macroexpansion.

Take care,
-- 
Camm Maguire                                            address@hidden
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