Well, that's rather the question, isn't it? I guess at the very least I'd like to be able to write something that looks and feels like suroutine but is inlined into the code that "calls" it, thus avoiding the overhead of a real subroutine call:

macro beep ($) {
   print LOG "BEEP: $_[0]\n";
}
[download]

Then I can beep() to my heart's content without killing my program with the subroutine overhead.

But that's just the start. Reading "On Lisp" made me realize that an expressive macro system can do more than just provide a fast, clean alternative to subroutine calls. How would this work in Perl, which is a lot more varied than Lisp? I'm not at all sure.

-sam

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