Re: [Caml-list] Camlp4 with traditional syntax (was: Camlp4 documentation)

[Alex Baretta <alex@barettadeit.com>]

Hendrik Tews wrote:
> Alex Cowie <cowie@cs.unisa.edu.au> writes:
> 
>    For me, the use of revised syntax has been a disincentive to using
>    Camlp4 metaprogramming.  I have always wondered whether a traditional
>    syntax version of Camlp4 was technically feasible.  Any comments?
> 
> I believe it is possible. You can parse traditional ocaml (as
> opposed to the revised syntax) with camlp4, so it should be
> possible to write a quotation expander using traditional ocaml. I
> remember Daniel de Rauglaudre complaint a few times about the
> difficulty of parsing ocaml. So a quotation expander using
> traditional ocaml might have dark corners which do not look as
> elegant as pa_macro.ml.

There is one more issue with Camlp4: it does not allow for quotations to 
expand to generic syntactic elements. Often, I use quotations which 
expand to module definitions. I had to implement my own quotation 
expander, bypassing the limitations of Camlp4 to achieve this.

Alex


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