007, a small experimental language with a license to macro
github.com
github.com
A quick summary of the language itself: I felt I needed a smaller language than Perl 6 to "think" in as I mapped out exactly what we want from macros. If you're curious about the latest shape of that thinking process, you'll want to read https://gist.github.com/masak/13210c51f034f931af0c .
Implementing 007 has been a fun thing, and largely easier than I thought. Mostly bottlenecked by available tuits. Somewhat surprisingly, I found it much tougher going to implement user-defined operators than to implement macros. (But now that we have both, you can also haz custom operator macros!)
Next up, I plan to use 007 to map out as much of the terrain as possible covered by that gist above. That is, I want 007 to get synthetic Qtrees, really good handling of hygiene and lexical scoping, statement macros, maybe multis if I feel it's worth the trouble, introspection of Qtrees, and visitor macros.
Here I might as well ask HN what syntax I should go with for unquotes in 007. In Perl 6, unquotes are written as three nested braces: {{{$ast}}}
Almost no-one is happy with that syntax. It manages to be distinctive (and can be easily syntax-highlighted, too) but pretty it ain't.
The difficulty of finding something better is that it has to be orthogonal to basically all other syntax in the language. And that's a challenge in Perl. :) People keep proposing Unicode sigils and stuff, but I haven't seen something I like yet.