OSDev.org

Duplicate post.

While I expect you'll all be devestated to hear that I am for the moment too busy with my own language design issues, and life in general, to continue lecturing you about macros, I assure that if this conversation gets out of hand again I'll be right on top of the subject. I'll be working over time on elaborating on what can be done with CL macros, why variable capture is a Bad Thing, and how Scheme solved the problem and the issues that resulted from that. Eventually I'll get around to explaining what all this has to do with assembly language, even, though anyone who has bothered looking at my recent projects can probably guess.

Anyway, if any of you really can't wait, I recommend you look up On Lisp by Paul Graham, which is sort of the seminal work on the subject and can be downloaded for free as a PDF from Graham's own website (you'll find a link to the download page down at the bottom, next to the link to Amazon). It's actually worth a read even if you don't know or care about Lisp, as it explains a lot of things that could potentially apply to other languages as well. If you really like it, you could follow up with Let Over Lambda, which expands on the themes and is a sort of paean to the power of Lisp macros in general.