[Aldor-l] [Axiom-developer] Re: exports and constants

[Page, Bill]

On July 27, 2006 12:44 PM Gaby wrote:

> ... Basically, it boils down to manipulating things
> symbolically and Lisp is very good at that.

I do not see that reflection has anything specifically
to do with symbolic manipulation.

> Other languages can be used, but they are going to
> mimic Lisp.

Well, yeeaasss ... to the extent that they support first
order types. I admit that it is easy to to this kind of
thing in Lisp in a less structured way - at least it used
to be in versions of lisp before types in lisp became
popular. I don't know enough about types in modern lisp
to know how this would work now in compiled lisp programs.

> 
> Unless, you have a way to implement this directly in
> the compiler. See Template Haskell (in GHC sources) for
> the kind of thing that is done. 
> 

It is very very easy for the compiler to generate self-
identifying type constants either all the time or as a
compile-time option. This can even been done in a simple
pre-compilation step if necessary.

Regards,
Bill Page.