syntax transformers

I've seen defmacro before, and while the pros and cons of "hygiene" are contentious, I had never bothered to learn macros in Scheme before. So now I'm working my way through Kent Dybvig's "The Scheme Programming Language", and I have to say, I like what I see. Here's an example I wrote today:

;;; Exercise 3.1.3

(define-syntax my-let*

  (syntax-rules ()

    [(_ ((x e)) body ...)

      (let ((x e))

        body ...)]

    [(_ ((x1 e1) (x2 e2) ...) body ...)

      (let ((x1 e1))

        (my-let* ((x2 e2) ...) body ...))]))

Used in the REPL as follows:

> (my-let* ([a 5] [b (+ a a)] [c (+ a b)])

    (list a b c))

'(5 10 15)

Tags: old-post

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