On Monday 10 December 2007 22:59, Jon Harrop wrote:
> On Monday 10 December 2007 22:13, Oliver Bandel wrote:
> > Because I don't know how it's implemented, I don't know if this adds a
> > performance lack. But possibly it would make sense to look at it closer
> > to explore it's advantages and disadvantages...
> > ...but I've no experience in OCaml extension, so I hope someone here can
> > say some wprds about it.
>
> OCaml has a great macro system called camlp4 that lets you add new
> syntactic constructs and rewrite OCaml code at will. So Martin's code adds
> a new syntactic construct and automatically injects the code for the
> compiler that we must currently write by hand. Consequently, its
> performance will be superb: as good as hand-written OCaml code.
>
> However, using any camlp4 macros requires using the camlp4 replacement for
> the front-end of the compiler. That uses a different parsing technology
> (top-down recursive descent LL rather than bottom-up LALR) so the error
> messages from the compiler are completely different.

Incidentally, the single biggest disadvantage of adding syntactic constructs 
like this using macros is that your code will no longer autoindent properly.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e