Fun With Lisp Macros

Sat, 26 Apr 2014 12:04:31 -0400

As far as programming languages go, my truly favorite language is a Lisp. Scheme or Common Lisp are fine. I have a few hesitations about Clojure (the way it does recursion is offputting to me, but perhaps a few macros might clean it up), but for what I’ve done with it when working with Riemann, it’s been a pleasure, even if it’s slow going because I don’t do it frequently enough to have the needed bits already in my head.

In one of my previous posts, I wrote about how I’d written the website software for a website I maintain in Common Lisp. There were a few macros I wrote while building it that I thought were potentially useful and illustrative of the kinds of things you can do with macros that make Lisps cool.

In this post (there may be others later), I’ll be talking about a macro I wrote to deal with database queries. When dealing with database queries, making sure that you write/generate the queries properly with respect to escaping and bind variables, and connection caching, etc. can be a real pain, and I’m not a big fan of ORMs as they never really do what I want.

Lisp on about:rileycsillag fka drewcsillag

Fun With Lisp Macros