Macros

[Richard]

Norman Ramsey writes:

>When I compare Lisp and Haskell, the big question in my mind is this:
>is lazy evaluation sufficient to make up for the lack of macros?

it might make sense for Haskell to have a facility that makes it
possible for the programmer to define new bits of syntactic sugar
without changing the compiler.

eg, I recently wanted 

  case2 foo of ...

as sugar for

  foo >>= \output->
  case output of ...

if you want to call such an easy-sugar-making facility a macro
facility, fine by me.  personally, I wouldnt bother with such a
facility.

aside from simple macros that are just sugar, macros go against the
Haskell philosophy, imo, because macros do not obey as many formal laws
as functions do and because a macro is essentially a new language
construct.  rather than building what is essentially a language with
dozens and dozens of constructs, the Haskell way is to re-use the 3
constructs of lambda calculus over and over again (with enough sugar to
keep things human-readable).