8 Jan
2014
8 Jan
'14
8:38 a.m.
>>> Incidentally, "homoiconicity"
just means that they wrote the
>>> language back-end and then knocked off without bothering with the
>>> front-end, so you have to enter your program as a raw AST instead.
>> Careful. Not only is this statement wrong, [...]
> I think you misunderstand what Peter was alluding to.
Oh, this is interesting. The Wikipedia page actually contradicts
itself. At one point, it says that "If a language has homoiconicity,
it means that the language text has the same structure as its abstract
syntax tree (i.e. the AST and the syntax are isomorphic)", which _is_
what the quote I was replying to claims, but is not a particularly
interesting property. But the very next sentence says that "In a
homoiconic language the primary representation of programs is also a
data structure in a primitive type of the language itself", which is
not really related to the syntax programmers see and is the aspect
that's relevant to the conversation (or at least to what I understand
the conversation to be about).
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