Destructuring Macros in Ioke

09 April 2009 at 23:04PM

In Ioke, a macro is a method that receives its arguments unevaluated. Instead of receiving a series of arguments, it receives a message. All code in Ioke is represented by message chains. A message looks something like this:

Take a look at that call to each. It receives two arguments, separated by a comma: the name of the variable to bind the incoming variable to, and the code for the loop. It's equivalent to the following code in Ruby:

It’s pretty similar, except that in Ruby a block represents a special syntax form. In Ioke, calls to each follow the same syntax rules as any other kind of call, except that each is written as a macro, not a method. In the case above we don’t want to evaluate that first argument (name), because it doesn’t actually represent anything in the local scope. If you tried to evaluate it, you’d receive an error:

Macros allow a programmer to pick apart the arguments they receive and choose to evaluate them or not evaluate them, or evaluate them in particular contexts, as they so choose. They're enormously powerful, but can be tricky to use, because without a structured argument list you're never quite sure what you're getting without taking a close look at the incoming message chain. That's where *destructuring macros* come in. dmacros are special kinds of meta-macros that allow you to write your code based on what you're expecting from an incoming message. Here's an example of a simple dmacro used by Message to allow you to turn transform any arbitrary code you give it into a message:

Think of them as a bit like multimethods: they perform the hard work of macro argument matching and allow you to write code that’s more clear and structured than it would otherwise be. Note that you still get access to the low-level call information that a regular macro would receive, so you can perform special tricks with the incoming arguments or the rest of the message chain if you’d like.