This technique caught on so quickly that within a few days, most programs contained dozens of notes defining functions that were only used by code in other notes. To make it easy for Mac to pick out the notes containing only definitions that didn't require any immediate response, the programmers tagged them with the standard preface: "Definition for Mac, Read Only." This—as the programmers were still quite lazy—was quickly shortened to "DEF. MAC. R/O" and then "DEFMACRO."
Pretty soon, there was no actual English left in the notes for Mac. All he did all day was read and respond to e-mails from the compiler containing DEFMACRO notes and calls to the functions defined in the DEFMACROs. Since the Lisp programs in the notes did all the real work, keeping up with the e-mails was no problem. Mac suddenly had a lot of time on his hands and would sit in his office daydreaming about white-sand beaches, clear blue ocean water, and drinks with little paper umbrellas in them.
Several months later the programmers realized nobody had seen Mac for quite some time. When they went to his office, they found a thin layer of dust over everything, a desk littered with travel brochures for various tropical locations, and the computer off. But the compiler still worked—how could it be? It turned out Mac had made one last change to the compiler: instead of e-mailing notes to Mac, the compiler now saved the functions defined by DEFMACRO notes and ran them when called for by the other notes. The programmers decided there was no reason to tell the big bosses Mac wasn't coming to the office anymore. So to this day, Mac draws a salary and from time to time sends the programmers a postcard from one tropical locale or another.
Macro Expansion Time vs. Runtime
The key to understanding macros is to be quite clear about the distinction between the code that generates code (macros) and the code that eventually makes up the program (everything else). When you write macros, you're writing programs that will be used by the compiler to generate the code that will then be compiled. Only after all the macros have been fully expanded and the resulting code compiled can the program actually be run. The time when macros run is called macro expansion time; this is distinct from runtime, when regular code, including the code generated by macros, runs.
It's important to keep this distinction firmly in mind because code running at macro expansion time runs in a very different environment than code running at runtime. Namely, at macro expansion time, there's no way to access the data that will exist at runtime. Like Mac, who couldn't run the programs he was working on because he didn't know what the correct inputs were, code running at macro expansion time can deal only with the data that's inherent in the source code. For instance, suppose the following source code appears somewhere in a program:
(defun foo (x)
(when (> x 10) (print 'big)))
Normally you'd think of x as a variable that will hold the argument passed in a call to foo. But at macro expansion time, such as when the compiler is running the WHEN macro, the only data available is the source code. Since the program isn't running yet, there's no call to foo and thus no value associated with x. Instead, the values the compiler passes to WHEN are the Lisp lists representing the source code, namely, (> x 10) and (print 'big). Suppose that WHEN is defined, as you saw in the previous chapter, with something like the following macro:
(defmacro when (condition &rest body)
`(if ,condition (progn ,@body)))
When the code in foo is compiled, the WHEN macro will be run with those two forms as arguments. The parameter condition will be bound to the form (> x 10), and the form (print 'big) will be collected into a list that will become the value of the &rest body parameter. The backquote expression will then generate this code:
(if (> x 10) (progn (print 'big)))
by interpolating in the value of condition and splicing the value of body into the PROGN.
When Lisp is interpreted, rather than compiled, the distinction between macro expansion time and runtime is less clear because they're temporally intertwined. Also, the language standard doesn't specify exactly how an interpreter must handle macros—it could expand all the macros in the form being interpreted and then interpret the resulting code, or it could start right in on interpreting the form and expand macros when it hits them. In either case, macros are always passed the unevaluated Lisp objects representing the subforms of the macro form, and the job of the macro is still to produce code that will do something rather than to do anything directly.
DEFMACRO
As you saw in Chapter 3, macros really are defined with DEFMACRO forms, though it stands—of course—for DEFine MACRO, not Definition for Mac. The basic skeleton of a DEFMACRO is quite similar to the skeleton of a DEFUN.
(defmacro name (parameter*)
"Optional documentation string."
body-form*)
Like a function, a macro consists of a name, a parameter list, an optional documentation string, and a body of Lisp expressions.[93] However, as I just discussed, the job of a macro isn't to do anything directly—its job is to generate code that will later do what you want.
Macros can use the full power of Lisp to generate their expansion, which means in this chapter I can only scratch the surface of what you can do with macros. I can, however, describe a general process for writing macros that works for all macros from the simplest to the most complex.
The job of a macro is to translate a macro form—in other words, a Lisp form whose first element is the name of the macro—into code that does a particular thing. Sometimes you write a macro starting with the code you'd like to be able to write, that is, with an example macro form. Other times you decide to write a macro after you've written the same pattern of code several times and realize you can make your code clearer by abstracting the pattern.
Regardless of which end you start from, you need to figure out the other end before you can start writing a macro: you need to know both where you're coming from and where you're going before you can hope to write code to do it automatically. Thus, the first step of writing a macro is to write at least one example of a call to the macro and the code into which that call should expand.
Once you have an example call and the desired expansion, you're ready for the second step: writing the actual macro code. For simple macros this will be a trivial matter of writing a backquoted template with the macro parameters plugged into the right places. Complex macros will be significant programs in their own right, complete with helper functions and data structures.
After you've written code to translate the example call to the appropriate expansion, you need to make sure the abstraction the macro provides doesn't "leak" details of its implementation. Leaky macro abstractions will work fine for certain arguments but not others or will interact with code in the calling environment in undesirable ways. As it turns out, macros can leak in a small handful of ways, all of which are easily avoided as long as you know to check for them. I'll discuss how in the section "Plugging the Leaks."
93
As with functions, macros can also contain declarations, but you don't need to worry about those for now.