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Mini-tutorial on explicit renaming macros in Chicken

The following is an attempt to explain, how to write hygienic macros in Chicken with explicit renaming. It supposes, that the reader knows, how to write other low-level-macros like define-macro in Chicken-3 and other Schemes. As you will see, explicit renaming macros are even easier to write than those with define-macro. This is because there is a brute force method to avoid variable capture.

Let's consider a trivial macro a la Chicken-3 without any considerations on hygiene and variable capture:

(define-macro swap!  ; wrong
  (lambda (x y)
    `(let ((tmp ,x))
       (set! ,x ,y)
       (set! ,y tmp))))

You might be surprised, but the replacement text, that within the backquotes, need not be changed in an explicit renaming macro, at least in a first step. What has to be changed, is the signature: explicit renaming transformers are always procedures of three variables, usually called form, rename, compare:

(define-syntax swap!
  (lambda (form rename compare)
    ...
    `(let ((tmp ,x))
       (set! ,x ,y)
       (set! ,y tmp))))

and you have to destructure the form argument, which is the whole macro-from, (swap! x y) in the example, either by hand, or by means of a macro from the matchable package, to fill in the ellipsis above. That is, without any helper macros, you get

(define-syntax swap!
  (lambda (form rename compare)
    (let ((x (cadr form))
          (y (caddr form)))
      `(let ((tmp ,x))
         (set! ,x ,y)
         (set! ,y tmp)))))

In this form, the new macro is the same as our first attempt with define-macro. We haven't bothered about variable capture or hygiene at all. But this macro already works. You can test it, say with

(let ((x 'x)
      (y 'y))
  (swap! x y)
  (list x y))

and see if it does what it is supposed to do. Of course, it is not correct, since if a client uses tmp as one of his or her arguments, the macro will crash.

In the classical macro systems, defmacro in Common Lisp or define-macro in some Schemes, you now have to think carefully, which macro variables are in danger of variable capture and use an uninterned symbol for them, tmp in the current example. Worse than that, contrary to Common Lisp, Scheme allows to use any name for variables, even keyword names as let, set!, ... so that define-macro can never create a hygienic swap! macro. Here is, where renaming comes into the play. You don't need gensym, use rename instead. And you needn't bother, which symbol to rename, rename all.

What does that mean, "all"? It's easy in the present example, everything within the backquote, except those symbols, which are already unquoted. But in more complicated examples, you should use expand, to see the replacement text of your macro calls.

  (pp (expand '(swap! x y)))

will result in the replacement text

(let ((tmp x))
  (set! x y)
  (set! y tmp))

Only x and y are arguments of your swap! call, hence everything else in the replacement text should be renamed: namely let, tmp and set!. So a hygienic version of swap! would be

(define-syntax swap!
  (lambda (form rename compare)
    (let ((x (cadr form))
          (y (caddr form)))
      `(,(rename 'let) ((,(rename 'tmp) ,x))
         (,(rename 'set!) ,x ,y)
         (,(rename 'set!) ,y ,(rename 'tmp))))))

If you repeat the expand call above, you will get the same replacement text, but with numbers suffixed to the renamed symbols, something like

(let11 ((tmp12 x))
  (set!13 x y)
  (set!13 y tmp12))

These renamed symbols have the same meaning as the original names without suffixes, but serve as aliases which the client cannot use under any circumstances.

Note, that the two appearances of tmp and set! are renamed to the same alias, the rename operator is referentially transparent. Note also, that these renamed symbols are much easier to interpret than gensym'ed ones!

I personally do not like these rename calls within the backquoted expression, because you loose the visual similarity between the backquoted expression and the resulting replacement text. Therefore I prefer this version, which is equivalent

(define-syntax swap!
  (lambda (form rename compare)
    (let ((x (cadr form))
          (y (caddr form))
          (%tmp (rename 'tmp))
          (%let (rename 'let))
          (%set! (rename 'set!)))
      `(,%let ((,%tmp ,x))
         (,%set! ,x ,y)
         (,%set! ,y ,%tmp)))))

You can think of the two characters ,% as an identity operator.

You see, explicit renaming macros are a bit more verbose than classical ones with define-macro. But everybody who is able to write the latter, is able to write the former as well. It's even easier!

explicit-renaming

Is there a way to cope with verbosity of explicit renaming macros? Of course, there is one. And you guess it, a macro might help. In the er-macros egg you'll find a macro named explicit-reaming which you can import-for-syntax. On purpose, this macro has the same syntax as syntax-rules, so that low-level macros are almost as easy to write as high-level ones. It will do the destructuring of the macro-call as well as the renaming behind the scene. Our running example will now look as follows

(import-for-syntax er-macros)
(define-syntax swap!
  (explicit-renaming (%tmp %let %set!)
    ((_ x y)
     (lambda (compare?)
       `(,%let ((,%tmp ,x))
           (,%set! ,x ,y)
           (,%set! ,y ,%tmp))))))

As you can see, the macro-call is matched against the pattern (_ x y), defining x and y, and the symbols tmp let and set! are renamed behind the scene and are referenced with %tmp, %let and %set!

Note, that the pattern is coupled to a procedure of the comparison argument, so that comparison is still possible in its body, although this does not happen here.

The er-macros egg introduces some other macros as well which make explicit renaming macros much easier, namely macro-define, macro-let and macro-letrec.

Author

Juergen Lorenz

ju (at) jugilo (dot) de

Initial version

Jun 09, 2009

Updated

Mar 29, 2011