Racket Macros : Scurry
This post will be about Racket macros. As a delivery mechanism, I will be using bits of my latest project, which is a virtual machine designed for emulating multiplayer networked board games via ZeroMQ. drey-vm executes compiled bytecode files - much like the CLR or JVM - using an instruction set of my design.
The design of the computer is out of the scope of this post (maybe another post if people are interested in it - let me know in the comments!?) suffice to stay it is written in D and is mostly a stack based computer, supporting functional and imperative programming. It has a string/object dictionary as its primary type,like lua and js.
Much like asi64, I wrote an assembler for the virtual machine in Racket. On top of that assembler I can now build a language (scurry). To start with, I am just creating a Racket language that is still a lisp - Racket has the fantasic power of being able to build macros on macros, gradually introducing higher level syntatic forms. In this way, I don’t really need write an actual compiler. Racket gives me the front end of the compiler for free (being lisp), and the macros-over-assembler method is a very fun and flexibile way to build up a language.