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lucian1900

Scala in general, and the macros are an especially bad case.

Granted macros are a two edged sword complexity-wise, this implementation is no exception. I think this is generally true for macros in other languages though.

Scala's "self cleaning" reify/eval mechanism is practically free syntax-wise - even Lisp has special characters for quasiquoting and splicing.

From what I'm seeing the macros are almost hygienic, which I guess is more than one can say about Common Lisp. But what you're describing as "self cleaning" just confuses me.

Compare the implementation of this particular macro with those in Scheme, Clojure or even Boo.

Self-cleaning basically means that they have a absolutely minimal, unhygienic macro and implemented the method which enforces hygiene as a macro itself – pretty impressive imho.

Maybe this one helps a bit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3912885

There is also a more detailed talk on macros, although I'm not sure it is already on the Skillsmatter site. Here are the slides: http://scalamacros.org/talks/2012-04-18-ScalaDays2012.pdf and also http://scalamacros.org/talks/2012-04-28-MetaprogrammingInSca....

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