- As I said in an earlier comment, "var" is just a typedef'd "void *". The downside is that libCello code is essentially untyped, but the upsides are that the C preprocessor is now enough to do the processing needed for the rest of the macros in the language, and that you can still mix regular typed C with libCello code for a "best of both worlds" mix.
- Looks pretty, right? What you're responding to is not just the nice non-capitalized macros and the $ keyword, but the syntax highlighting in his examples. Fire up a text editor and write you some libCello code without this highlighting and it probably won't feel as nice.
I'm extremely interested in the idea of taking the syntax highlighting, formatting, and code completion OUT of these specialized IDEs and plugins and into some kind of standard "bidirectional channel" between a language processor or compiler, its macro system, and the user's editor of choice.
We should be able to make entire DSLs and specialized syntaxes that not only compile, but are able to provide rich information to the surrounding development environment in a standardized way. I'm not alone on this. F#'s Type Providers do exactly that. But imagine being able to control not only the "intellisense", but also the syntax highlighting, argument/return tooltips, documentation, preferred formatting, snippets, etc.
And by "surrounding development environment" I mean everything from the command line to vim and emacs all the way to Sublime Text, Eclipse, and Visual Studio. Even github! Why do you have to register a new syntax highlighter on github for a language and hope they turn it on?