Shriram Krishnamurthi's CS173 Textbook online
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
Shriram Krishnamurthi is teaching the CS173 class at Brown and he has made the "textbook" for the course available on the web. I've only skimmed a number of the papers, but they look interesting.
The "Macros and their Impact on Language Design" chapter from the CS173 textbook is a very good introduction to Scheme macros. Shriram starts off with an example macro (creating a for loop) and progressively refines the example, showing where you would use syntax-rules and where you would use syntax-case and explaining why. He talks about the design rationales behind Scheme macros and concludes with another series of examples showing how different Scheme language features complement the use of macros in Scheme.
