November 2010
Intermediate to advanced
504 pages
12h 45m
English
Content preview from Land of LispBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Macros: Dangers and Alternatives
Macros allow us to write code that generates other code, making the Lisp languages a wonderful tool for metaprogramming and prototyping new language ideas. But, at some level, macros are just a sleight of hand: They let you trick the Lisp compiler/interpreter into accepting your own customized language constructs and treating them like standard Lisp. They are indeed a powerful tool in a programmer’s tool chest, but they are not as elegant as some of the other programming tools you’ve encountered in this book.
The main drawback of macros is that they can make it hard for other programmers to understand your code. After all, if you’re creating your own language dialect, other programmers won’t be familiar with it. ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.