What makes Lisp macros so special?

2018-06-21 16:53:04

Reading Paul Graham's essays on programming languages one would think that Lisp macros are the only way to go. As a busy developer, working on other platforms, I have not had the privilege of using Lisp macros. As someone who wants to understand the buzz, please explain what makes this feature so powerful.

Please also relate this to something I would understand from the worlds of Python, Java, C# or C development.

To give the short answer, macros are used for defining language syntax extensions to Common Lisp or Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). These languages are embedded right into the existing Lisp code. Now, the DSLs can have syntax similar to Lisp (like Peter Norvig's Prolog Interpreter for Common Lisp) or completely different (eg Infix Notation Math for Clojure).

Here is a more concrete example:
Python has list comprehensions built into the language. This gives a simple syntax for a common case. The line

divisibleByTwo = [x for x in range(10) if x % 2 == 0]

yields a list containing all even numbers between 0 and 9. Back in the Python 1.5 days there was no such syntax; you'd use something more like this:

divisibleByTwo = []
for x in range( 10 ):
   if x % 2 == 0:
      divisibleByTwo.append( x )

These are both functionally equivalent. Let's invoke our suspension of disbelief and pretend Lisp has a very limited loop macro that just does iteration and no easy way to do the equivalent of list comprehensions.

In Lisp you could write the following. I should note this contrived example is picked to be identical to the Python code not a good example of Lisp code.

;; the following two functions just make equivalent of Python's range function
;; you can safely ignore them unless you are running this code
(defun range-helper (x)
  (if (= x 0)
      (list x)
      (cons x (range-helper (- x 1)))))

(defun range (x)
  (reverse (range-helper (- x 1))))

;; equivalent to the python example:
;; define a variable
(defvar divisibleByTwo nil)

;; loop from 0 upto and including 9
(loop for x in (range 10)
   ;; test for divisibility by two
   if (= (mod x 2) 0) 
   ;; append to the list
   do (setq divisibleByTwo (append divisibleByTwo (list x))))

Before I go further, I should better explain what a macro is. It is a transformation performed on code by code. That is, a piece of code, read by the interpreter (or compiler), which takes in code as an argument, manipulates and the returns the result, which is then run in-place.

Of course that's a lot of typing and programmers are lazy. So we could define DSL for doing list comprehensions. In fact, we're using one macro already (the loop macro).

Lisp defines a couple of special syntax forms. The quote ( ' ) indicates the next token is a literal. The quasiquote or backtick ( ` ) indicates the next token is a literal with escapes. Escapes are indicated by the comma operator. The literal '(1 2 3) is the equivalent of Python's [1, 2, 3] . You can assign it to another variable or use it in place. You can think of `(1 2 ,x) as the equivalent of Python's [1, 2, x] where x is a variable previously defined. This list notation is part of the magic that goes into macros. The second part is the Lisp reader which intelligently substitutes macros for code but that is best illustrated below:

So we can define a macro called lcomp (short for list comprehension). It's syntax will be exactly like the python that we used in the example [x for x in range(10) if x % 2 == 0] - (lcomp x for x in (range 10) if (= (% x 2) 0))

(defmacro lcomp (expression for var in list conditional conditional-test)
  ;; create a unique variable name for the result
  (let ((result (gensym)))
    ;; the arguments are really code so we can substitute them 
    ;; store nil in the unique variable name generated above
    `(let ((,result nil))
       ;; var is a variable name
       ;; list is the list literal we are suppose to iterate over
       (loop for ,var in ,list
            ;; conditional is if or unless
            ;; conditional-test is (= (mod x 2) 0) in our examples
            ,conditional ,conditional-test
            ;; and this is the action from the earlier lisp example
            ;; result = result + [x] in python
            do (setq ,result (append ,result (list ,expression))))
           ;; return the result 
       ,result)))

Now we can execute at the command line:

CL-USER> (lcomp x for x in (range 10) if (= (mod x 2) 0))
(0 2 4 6 8)

Pretty neat, huh? Now it doesn't stop there. You have a mechanism, or a paintbrush, if you like. You can have any syntax you could possibly want. Like Python or C#'s with syntax. Or .NET's LINQ syntax. In end, this is what attracts people to Lisp - ultimate flexibility.

You will find a comprehensive debate around lisp macro here.

An interesting subset of that article:

In most programming languages, syntax is complex. Macros have to take apart program syntax, analyze it, and reassemble it. They do not have access to the program's parser, so they have to depend on heuristics and best-guesses. Sometimes their cut-rate analysis is wrong, and then they break.

But Lisp is different. Lisp macros do have access to the parser, and it is a really simple parser. A Lisp macro is not handed a string, but a preparsed piece of source code in the form of a list, because the source of a Lisp program is not a string; it is a list. And Lisp programs are really good at taking apart lists and putting them back together. They do this reliably, every day.

Here is an extended example. Lisp has a macro, called "setf", that performs assignment. The simplest form of setf is

  (setf x whatever)

which sets the value of the symbol "x" to the value of the expression "whatever".

Lisp also has lists; you can use the "car" and "cdr" functions to get the first element of a list or the rest of the list, respectively.

Now what if you want to replace the first element of a list with a new value? There is a standard function for doing that, and incredibly, its name is even worse than "car". It is "rplaca". But you do not have to remember "rplaca", because you can write

  (setf (car somelist) whatever)

to set the car of somelist.

What is really happening here is that "setf" is a macro. At compile time, it examines its arguments, and it sees that the first one has the form (car SOMETHING). It says to itself "Oh, the programmer is trying to set the car of somthing. The function to use for that is 'rplaca'." And it quietly rewrites the code in place to:

  (rplaca somelist whatever)

Common Lisp macros essentially extend the "syntactic primitives" of your code.

For example, in C, the switch/case construct only works with integral types and if you want to use it for floats or strings, you are left with nested if statements and explicit comparisons. There's also no way you can write a C macro to do the job for you.

But, since a lisp macro is (essentially) a lisp program that takes snippets of code as input and returns code to replace the "invocation" of the macro, you can extend your "primitives" repertoire as far as you want, usually ending up with a more readable program.

To do the same in C, you would have to write a custom pre-processor that eats your initial (not-quite-C) source and spits out something that a C compiler can understand. It's not a wrong way to go about it, but it's not necessarily the easiest.

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