Problems of syntax-rules Macros

As we’ve seen, using syntax-rules solves many of the problems of macros, but it comes with a high price tag: the macros are “just” rewrite rules. As rewrite rules they’re pretty sophisticated, but it still loses a huge advantage of what we had with define-macro — the macro code is no longer Racket code but a simple language of rewrite rules.

There are two big problems with this which we will look into now. (DrRacket’s macro stepper tool can be very useful in clarifying these examples.) The first problem is that in some cases we want to perform computations at the macro level — for example, consider a repeat macro that needs to expand like this:

With a syntax-rules macro we can match over specific integers, but we just cannot do this with any integer. Note that this specific case can be done better via a function — better by not replicating the expression:

or even better, assuming the above for is already implemented:

But still, we want to have the ability to do such computation. A similar, and perhaps better example, is better error reporting. For example, the above for implementation blindly expands its input, so:

we get a bad error message in terms of lambda, which is breaking abstraction (it comes from the expansion of for, which is an implementation detail), and worse — it is an error about something that the user didn’t write.

Yet another aspect of this problem is that sometimes we need to get creative solutions where it would be very simple to write the corresponding Racket code. For example, consider the problem of writing a rev-app macro — (rev-app F E …) should evaluate to a function similar to (F E …), except that we want the evaluation to go from right to left instead of the usual left-to-right that Racket does. This code is obviously very broken:

because it generates a malformed let form — there is no way for the macro expander to somehow know that the reverse should happen at the transformation level. In this case, we can actually solve this using a helper macro to do the reversing:

There are still problems with this — it complains about x ... because there is a single x there rather than a sequence of them; and even if it did somehow work, we also need the xs in that last line in the original order rather than the reversed one. So the solution is complicated by collecting new xs while reversing — and since we need them in both orders, we’re going to collect both orders:

So, this worked, but in this case the simplicity of the syntax-rules rewrite language worked against us, and made a very inconvenient solution. This could have been much easier if we could just write a “meta-level” reverse, and a use of map to generate the names.

… And all of that was just the first problem. The second one is even harder: syntax-rules is designed to avoid all name captures, but what if we want to break hygiene? There are some cases where you want a macro that “injects” a user-visible identifier into its result. The most common (and therefore the classic) example of this is an anaphoric if macro, that binds it to the result of the test (which can be any value, not just a boolean):

which we want to turn to:

The obvious definition of `if-it’ doesn’t work:

The reason it doesn’t work should be obvious now — it is designed to avoid the it that the macro introduced from interfering with the it that the user code uses.

Next, we’ll see Racket’s “low level” macro system, which can later be used to solve these problems.

Racket’s “Low-Level” Macros

As we’ve previously seen, syntax-rules creates transformation functions — but there are other more direct ways to write these functions. These involve writing a function directly rather than creating one with syntax-rules — and because this is a more low-level approach than using syntax-rules to generate a transformer, it is called a “low level macro system”. All Scheme implementations have such low-level systems, and these systems vary from one to the other. They all involve some particular type that is used as “syntax” — this type is always related to S-expressions, but it cannot be the simple define-macro tool that we’ve seen earlier if we want to avoid the problems of capturing identifiers.

Historical note: For a very long time the Scheme standard had avoided a concrete specification of this low-level system, leaving syntax-rules as the only way to write portable Scheme code. This had lead some people to explore more thoroughly the things that can be done with just syntax-rules rewrites, even beyond the examples we’ve seen. As it turns out, there’s a lot that can be done with it — in fact, it is possible to write rewrite rules that implement a lambda calculus, making it possible to write things that look close to “real code”. This is, however, awkward to get used to, and redundant with a macro system that can use the full language for arbitrary computations. It has also became less popular recently, since R6RS dictates something that is known as a “syntax-case macro system” (not really a good name, since syntax-case is just a tool in this system).

Racket uses an extended version of this syntax-case system, which is what we will discuss now. In the Racket macro system, “syntax” is a new type, not just S-expressions as is the case with define-macro. The way to think about this type is as a wrapper around S-expressions, where the S-expression is the “raw” symbolic form of the syntax, and a bunch of “stuff” is added. Two important bits of this “stuff” are the source location information for the syntax, and its lexical scope. The source location is what you’d expect: the file name for the syntax (if it was read from a file), its position in the file, and its line and column numbers; this information is mostly useful for reporting errors. The lexical scope information is used in a somewhat peculiar way: there is no direct way to access it, since usually you don’t need to do so — instead, for the rare cases where you do need to manipulate it, you copy the lexical scope of an existing syntax to create another. This allows the macro interface to be usable without specification of a specific representation for the scope.

The main piece of functionality in this system is syntax-case (which has lead to its common name) — a form that is used to deconstruct the input via pattern-matching similar to syntax-rules. In fact, the syntax of syntax-case looks very similar to the syntax of syntax-rules — there are zero or more parenthesized keywords, and then clauses that begin with the same kind of patterns to match the syntax against. The first obvious difference is that the syntax to be matched is given explicitly:

A macro is written as a plain function, usually used as the value in a define-syntax form (but it could also be used in plain helper functions). For example, here’s how the orelse macro is written using this:

Racket’s define-syntax can also use the same syntactic sugar for functions as define:

The second significant change from syntax-rules is that the right-hand-side expressions in the branches are not patterns. Instead, they’re plain Racket expressions. In this example (as in most uses of syntax-case) the result of the syntax-case form is going to be the result of the macro, and therefore it should return a piece of syntax. So far, the only piece of syntax that we see in this code is just the input stx — and returning that will get the macro expander in an infinite loop (because we’re essentially making a transformer for orelse expressions that expands the syntax to itself).

To return a new piece of syntax, we need a way to write new syntax values. The common way to do this is using a new special form: syntax. This form is similar to quote — except that instead of an S-expression, it results in a syntax. For example, in this code:

the first printout happens during macro expansion, and the second is part of the generated code. Like quote, syntax has a convenient abbreviation — “#'”:

Now the question is how we can get the actual macro working. The thing is that syntax is not completely quoting its contents as a syntax — there could be some meta identifiers that are bound as “pattern variables” in the syntax-case pattern that was matched for the current clause — in this case, we have x and y as such pattern variables. (Actually, orelse is a pattern variable too, but this doesn’t matter for our purpose.) Using these inside a syntax will have them replaced by the syntax that they matched against. The complete orelse definition is therefore very easy:

The same treatment of ... holds here too — in the matching pattern they specify 0 or more occurrences of the preceding pattern, and in the output template they mean that the matching sequence is “spliced” in. Note that syntax-rules is now easy to define as a macro that expands to a function that uses syntax-case to do the actual rewrite work:

Solving the syntax-rules problems

So far it looks like we didn’t do anything new, but the important change is already in: the fact that the results of a macro is a plain Racket expression mean that we can now add more API functionality for dealing with syntax values. There is no longer a problem with running “meta-level” code vs generated runtime code: anything that is inside a syntax (anything that is quoted with a “#'”) is generated code, and the rest is code that is executed when the macro expands. We will now introduce some of the Racket macro API by demonstrating the solutions to the syntax-rules problem that were mentioned earlier.

First of all, we’ve talked about the problem of reporting good errors. For example, make this:

throw a proper error instead of leaving it for lambda to complain about. To make it easier to play with, we’ll use a simpler macro:

and using an explicit function:

One of the basic API functions is syntax-e — it takes in a syntax value and returns the S-expression that it wraps. In this case, we can pull out the identifier from this, and check that it is a valid identifier using symbol? on what it wraps:

The error is awkward though — it doesn’t look like the usual kind of syntax errors that Racket throws: it’s shown in an ugly way, and its source is not properly highlighted. A better way to do this is to use `raise-syntax-error’ — it takes an error message, the offending syntax, and the offending part of this syntax:

Another inconvenient issue is with pulling out the identifier. Consider that #'(lambda (id) E) is a new piece of syntax that has the supposed identifier in it — we pull it from that instead of from stx, but it would be even easier with #'(id), and even easier than that with just #'id which will be just the identifier:

Also, checking that something is an identifier is common enough that there is another predicate for this (the combination of syntax-e and symbol?) — identifier?:

As a side note, checking the input pattern for validity is very common, and in some cases might be needed to discriminate patterns (eg, one result when id is an identifier, another when it’s not). For this, syntax-cases clauses have “guard expressions” — so we can write the above more simply as:

This, however, produces a less informative “bad syntax” error, since there is no way to tell what the error message should be. (There is a relatively new Racket tool called syntax-parse where such requirements can be specified and a proper error message is generated on bad inputs.)

We can now resolve the repeat problem — create a (repeat N E) macro:

(Note that we can define an internal helper function, just like we do with plain functions.) But this doesn’t quite work (and if you try it, you’ll see an interesting error message) — the problem is that we’re generating code with a call to n-copies in it, instead of actually calling it. The problem is that we need to take the list that n-copies generates, and somehow “plant” it in the resulting syntax. So far the only things that were planted in it are pattern variables — and we can actually use another syntax-case to do just that: match the result of n-copies against a pattern variable, and then use that variable in the final syntax:

This works — but one thing to note here is that n-copies returns a list, not a syntax. The thing is that syntax-case will automatically “coerce” S-expressions into a syntax in some way, easy to do in this case since we only care about the elements of the list, and those are all syntaxes.

However, this use of syntax-case as a pattern variable binder is rather indirect, enough that it’s hard to read the code. Since this is a common use case, there is a shorthand for that too: with-syntax. It looks as a kind of a let-like form, but instead of binding plain identifiers, it binds pattern identifiers — and in fact, the things to be bound are themselves patterns:

Note that there is no need to implement with-syntax as a primitive form — it is not too hard to implement it as a macro that expands to the actual use of syntax-case. (In fact, you can probably guess now that the Racket core language is much smaller than it seems, with large parts that are implemented as layers of macros.)

There is one more related group of shorthands that is relevant here: quasisyntax, unsyntax, and unsyntax-splicing. These are analogous to the quoting forms by the same names, and they have similar shorthands: “#`”, “#,” and “#,@”. They could be used to implement this macro:

[As you might suspect now, these new forms are also implemented as macros, which expand to the corresponding uses of with-syntax, which in turn expand into syntax-case forms.]

We now have almost enough machinery to implement the rev-app macro, and compare it to the original (complex) version that used syntax-rules. The only thing that is missing is a way to generate a number of new identifiers — which we achieved earlier by a number of macro expansion (each expansion of a macro that has a new identifier x will have this identifier different from other expansions, which is why it worked). Racket has a function for this: generate-temporaries. Since it is common to generate temporaries for input syntaxes, the function expects an input syntax that has a list as its S-expression form (or a plain list).

Note that this is not shorter than the syntax-rules version, but it is easier to read since reverse and generate-temporaries have an obvious direct intention, eliminating the need to wonder through rewrite rules and inferring how they do their work. In addition, this macro expands in one step (use the macro stepper to compare it with the previous version), which makes it much more efficient.

Breaking Hygiene, How Bad is it?

We finally get to address the second deficiency of syntax-rules — its inability to intentionally capture an identifier so it is visible in user code. Let’s start with the simple version, the one that didn’t work:

and translate it to syntax-case:

The only problem here is that the it identifier is introduced by the macro, or more specifically, by the syntax form that makes up the return syntax. What we need now is a programmatic way to create an identifier with a lexical context that is different than the default. As mentioned above, Racket’s syntax system (and all other syntax-case systems) doesn’t provide a direct way to manipulate the lexical context. Instead, it provides a way to create a piece of syntax by copying the lexical scope of another one — and this is done with the datum->syntax function. The function consumes a syntax value to get the lexical scope from, and a “datum” which is an S-expression that can contain syntax values. The result will have these syntax values as given on the input, but raw S-expressions will be converted to syntaxes, using the given lexical context. In the above case, we need to convert an it symbol into the same-named identifier, and we can do that using the lexical scope of the input syntax. As we’ve seen before, we use with-syntax to inject the new identifier into the result:

We can even control the scope of the user binding — for example, it doesn’t make much sense to have it in the else branch. We can do this by first binding a plain (hygienic) identifier to the result, and only bind it to that when needed:

[A relevant note: Racket provides something that is known as “The Macro Writer’s Bill of Rights” — in this case, it guarantees that the extra let does not imply a runtime or a memory overhead.]

This works — and it’s a popular way for creating such user-visible bindings. However, breaking hygiene this way can lead to some confusing problems. Such problems are usually visible when we try to compose macros — for example, say that we want to create a cond-it macro, the anaphoric analogue of cond, which binds it in each branch. It seems that an obvious way of doing this is by layering it on top of if-it — it should even be simple enough to be defined with syntax-rules:

Surprisingly, this does not work! Can you see what went wrong?

The problem lies in how the it identifier is generated — it used the lexical context of the whole if-it expression, which seemed like exactly what we wanted. But in this case, the if-it expression is coming from the cond-it macro, not from the user input. Or to be more accurate: it’s the cond-it macro which is the user of if-it, so it is visible to cond-it, but not to its own users…

Note that these anaphoric macros are a popular example, but these problems do pop up elsewhere too. For example, imagine a loop macro that wants to bind break unhygienically, a class macro that binds this, and many others.

How can we solve this? There are several ways for this:

• Don’t break hygiene. For example, instead of if-it and cond-it forms that have an implicit it, use forms with an explicit identifiers. For example: (if* it <test> <then> <else>). This might be a little more verbose at times, but it makes everything behave very well, since the identifiers always have the right scope.

• Try to patch things up with a little more unhygienic in your macros. In this case, try to make cond-it introduce if-it unhygienically, so when it introduces it in its own turn, it will be the right one. This is bad, since we started trying to get hygienic macros, and there are no easy discounts. (For example, what if there’s a different if-it that is used at the place where cond-it is used?) In fact, the unhygienic define-macro that we’ve seen is an extreme example of this: there is no lexical scope anywhere; so it is the same identifier no matter where it’s introduced. But as we’ve seen, this means that hygiene is always broken when possible.

• Try to make cond-it come up with its own unhygienic it, then bind this it to the it that if-it creates. This can work but on one hand it’s difficult and fragile to write such code, and on the other hand it defeats the simplicity of macros.

• Finally, Racket provides an elegant solution in the form of syntax parameters. The idea is to avoid the unhygienic binding: have a single global binding for it, and change the meaning of this binding on uses of if-it. (If you’re interested, see “Keeping it Clean with Syntax Parameters” for details.)

Macros in Racket’s Module System

Not in PLAI

One of the main things that Racket pioneered is integrating its syntax system with its module system. In plain Racket (#lang racket, not the course languages), every file is a module that can provide some functionality, for when you put this code in a file:

You get a library that gives you a plus function. This is just the usual thing that you’d expect from a library facility in a language — but Racket allows you to do the same with syntax definitions. For example, if we add the following to this file:

we — the users of this library — also get to have a with binding, which is a “FLANG-compatibility” macro that expands into a let. Now, on a brief look, this doesn’t seem all too impressive, but conider the fact that with is actually a translation function that lives at the syntax level, as a kind of a compiler plugin, and you’ll see that this is not as trivial as it seems. Racket arranges to do this with a concept of instantiating code at the compiler level, so libraries are used in two ways: either the usual thing as a runtime instantiation, or at compile time.

Defining Languages in Racket

But then Racket takes this concept even further. So far, we treated the thing that follows a #lang as a kind of a language specification — but the more complete story is that this specification is actually just a module. The only difference between such modules like racket or pl and “library modules” as our above file is that language modules provide a bunch of functionality that is specific to a language implementation. However, you don’t need to know about these things up front: instead, there’s a few tools that allow you to provide everything that some other module provides – if we add this to the above:

then we get a library that provides the same two bindings as above (plus and with) — in addition to everything from the racket library (which it got from its own #lang racket line).

To use this file as a language, the last bit that we need to know about is the actual concrete level syntax. Racket provides an s-exp language which is a kind of a meta language for reading source code in the usual S-expression syntax. Assuming that the above is in a file called mylang.rkt, we can use it (from a different file in the same directory) as follows:

which makes the language of this file be (a) read using the S-expression syntax, and (b) get its bindings from our module, so

will show a result of 40.

So far this seems like just some awkward way to get to the same functionality as a simple library — but now we can use more tools to make things more interesting. First, we can provide everything from racket except for let — change the last provide to:

Next, we can provide our with but make it have the name let instead — by replacing that (provide with) with:

The result is a language that is the same as Racket, except that it has an additional plus “built-in” function, and its let syntax is different, as specified by our macro:

To top things off, there are a few “special” implicit macros that Racket uses. One of them, #%app, is a macro that is used implicitly whenever there’s an expression that looks like a function application. In our terms, that’s the Call AST node that gets used whenever a braced-form isn’t one of the known forms. If we override this macro in a similar way that we did for let, we’re essentially changing the semantics of application syntax. For example, here’s a definition that makes it possible to use a @ keyword to get a list of results of applying a function on several arguments:

This makes the (my-app add1 @ 1 2) application evaluate to '(2 3), but if @ is not used (as the second subexpression), we get the usual function application. (Note that this is because the last clause expands to (x ...) which implicitly has the usual Racket function application.) We can now make our language replace Racket’s implicit #%app macro with this, in the same way as we did before: first, drop Racket’s version from what we provide:

and then provide our definition instead

Users of our language get this as the regular function application:

Since #%app is a macro, it can evaluate to anything, even to things that are not function applications at all. For example, here’s an extended definition that adds an arrow syntax that expands to a lambda expression not to an actual application:

And an example of using it

Another such special macro is #%module-begin: this is a macro that is wrapped around the whole module body. Changing it makes it possible to change the semantics of a sequence of toplevel expressions in our language. The following is our complete language, with an example of redefining #%module-begin to create a “verbose” language that prints out expressions and what they evaluate to (note the verbose helper macro that is completely internal):

And for reference, try that language with the above example:

Macro Conclusions

PLAI §37.5

Macros are extremely powerful, but this also means that their usage should be restricted only to situations where they are really needed. You can view any function as extending the current collection of tools that you provide — where these tools are much more difficult for your users to swallow than plain functions: evaluation can happen in any way, with any scope, unlike the uniform rules of function application. An analogy is that every function (or value) that you provide is equivalent to adding nouns to a vocabulary, but macros can add completely new rules for reading, since using them might result in a completely different evaluation. Because of this, adding macros carelessly can make code harder to read and debug — and using them should be done in a way that is as clear as possible for users.

When should a macro be used?

• Providing cosmetics: eliminating some annoying repetitiveness and/or inconvenient verbosity. This is usually macros that are intended to beautify code, for example, we could use a macro to make this bit of the Sloth source:

  (list '+ (box (racket-func->prim-val + #t)))
  (list '- (box (racket-func->prim-val - #t)))
  (list '* (box (racket-func->prim-val + #t)))

  look much better, by using a macro instead of the above. We can try to use a function, but we still need two inputs for each call — the name and the function:

  (rfpv '+ + #t)
  (rfpv '- - #t)
  (rfpv '* + #t)

  and a macro can eliminate this (small, but potentially dangerous) redundancy. For example:

  (define-syntax-rule (rfpv fun flag)
    (list 'fun (box (racket-func->prim-val fun flag))))

  and then:

  (rfpv + #t)
  (rfpv - #t)
  (rfpv * #t)

  eliminates the typo that was in the previous examples (did you catch that?).

• Altering the order of evaluation: as seen with the orelse macro, we can control evaluation order in our macro. This is achieved by translating the macro into Racket code with a known evaluation order. We even choose not to evaluate some parts, or evaluate some parts multiple times (eg, the for macro).

  Note that by itself, we could get this if only we had a more light-weight notation for thunks, since then we could simply use functions. For example, a while function could easily be used with thunks:

  (define (while cond body)
    (when (cond)
      (body)
      (while cond body)))

  if the syntax for a thunk would be as easy as, for example, using curly braces:

  (let ([i 0])
    (while { (< i 10) }
      { (printf "i = ~s\n" i) (set! i (+ i 1)) }))

• Introducing binding constructs: macros that have a different binding structure from Racket built-ins. These kind of macros are ones that makes a powerful language — for example, we’ve seen how we can survive without basic built-ins like let. For example, the for macro has its own binding structure.

  Note that with a sufficiently concise syntax for functions such as the arrow functions in JavaScript, we can get away with plain functions here too. For example, instead of a with macro, we could do it with a function:

  function with(val,fun) { return fun(val); }
  with( 123, x => x*x );

  (The obvious inconvenience is that the order can be weird.)

• Defining data languages: macros can be used for expressions that are not Racket expressions themselves. For example, the parens that wrap binding pairs in a let form are not function applications. Some times it is possible to use quotes for that, but then we get run-time values rather than being able to translate them into Racket code. Another usage of this category is to hide representation details that might involve implicit lambda’s (for example, delay) — if we define a macro, then there is a single point where we control whether an expression is used within some lambda — but it it was a function, we’d have to change every usage of it to add an explicit lambda.

It is also important to note that macros should not be used too frequently. As said above, every macro adds a completely different way of reading your code — a way that doesn’t use the usual “nouns” and “verbs”, but there are other reasons not to use a macro.

One common usage case is as an optimization — trying to avoid an extra function call. For example, this:

might seem wasteful if you don’t want a full function call on every usage of min. So you might be tempted to use this instead:

you even know the pitfalls of C macros so you make it more robust:

But small functions like the above are things that any decent compiler should know how to optimize, and even if your compiler doesn’t, it’s still not worth doing this optimization because programmer time is the most expensive factor in any computer system. In addition, a compiler is committed to doing these optimizations only when possible (eg, it is not possible to in-line a recursive function) and to do proper in-lining — unlike the min CPP macro above which is erroneous in case x or y are expressions that have side-effects.

Side-note: macros in mainstream languages

Macros are an extremely powerful tool in Racket (and other languages in the Lisp family) — how come nobody else uses them?

Well, people have tried to use them in many contexts. The problem is that you cannot get away with a simple solution that does nothing more than textual manipulation of your programs. For example, the standard C preprocessor is a macro language, but it is fundamentally limited to very simple situations. This is still a hot topic these days, with modern languages trying out different solutions (or giving up and claiming that macros are evil).

Here is an example that was written by Mark Jason Dominus (“Higher Order Perl”), in a Perl mailing list post among further discussion on macros in Lisp vs other languages, including Perl’s source transformers that are supposed to fill a similar role.

The example starts with writing the following simple macro:

This doesn’t quite work because

expands to

which is 2, but you wanted 0.02. So you need this instead:

but this breaks because

expands to

which is 3, but you wanted 4. So you need this instead:

But what about

which expands to

or an expensive expression? So you need this instead:

but now it only works for ints; you can’t do square(3.5) any more. To really fix this you have to use nonstandard extensions, something like:

or more like:

And that’s just to get trivial macros, like “square()”, to work.

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You should be able to appreciate now the tremendous power of macros. This is why there are so many “primitive features” of programming languages that can be considered as merely library functionality given a good macro system. For example, people are used to think about OOP as some inherent property of a language — but in Racket there are at least two very different object systems that it comes with, and several others in user-distributed code. All of these are implemented as a library which provides the functionality as well as the necessary syntax in the form of macros. So the basic principle is to have a small core language with powerful constructs, and make it easy to express complex ideas using these constructs.

This is an important point to consider before starting a new DSL (reminder: domain specific language) — if you need something that looks like a simple DSL but might grow to a full language, you can extend an existing language with macros to have the features you want, and you will always be able to grow to use the full language if necessary. This is particularly easy with Racket, but possible in other languages too.

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Side note: the principle of a powerful but simple code language and easy extensions is not limited to using macros — other factors are involved, like first-class functions. In fact, “first class”-ness can help in many situations, for example: single inheritance + classes as first-class values can be used instead of multiple inheritance.