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Hello Haskell, Goodbye Lisp (2009) (newartisans.com)
12 points by juliangamble on Oct 4, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments



I'm not a Lisp nor Haskell programmer though I plan to learn both. The article was quite interesting especially the part about macros. How much does lazy evaluation decrease the need for macros?


Flow-control macros often become plain functions in Haskell, thanks to a combination of lazy evaluation and monadic syntax. `while`, `for`, `or` etc are all just regular functions.

That said, macros are still useful for embedding foreign language snippets as literals (e.g. XML). GHC's TemplateHaskell extension takes care of that use case; it also provides quasi-quotation facilities that turns Haskell snippets into syntax tree literals for heavy-duty metaprogramming.




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