jackfirth / jackfirth/resyntax

Ask politely for a stable macro expander hook

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#19 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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enhancement
Dominant language
Racket
Stars
70
Forks
11
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

At present, resyntax relies on the undocumented and deeply magic current-expand-observe parameter (intended for the macro stepper) to apply refactoring rules to visited syntax objects. This has a few problems:

  • It's an unstable API whose details change whenever the macro expander or macro stepper changes.
  • It provides way more information than resyntax needs. All resyntax needs is a list of original syntax objects visited during expansion.
  • It doesn't provide a way to pause expansion, so there doesn't seem to be a way for refactoring rules to use local-expand or syntax-local-value.

Eventually it would be nice to have a public, documented, stable, and less powerful alternative to current-expand-observe in Racket.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reading how resyntax currently relies on the undocumented current-expand-observe parameter. The issue calls for a public, documented, stable, less powerful alternative that provides visited syntax objects and can pause expansion for local-expand or syntax-local-value. Done means the alternative exists and addresses these stated limitations.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
devtools
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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