NDLI: Sweeten your JavaScript: hygienic macros for ES5

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Sweeten your JavaScript: hygienic macros for ES5

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Faubion, Nathan Flanagan, Cormac Disney, Tim Herman, David
Abstract	Lisp and Scheme have demonstrated the power of macros to enable programmers to evolve and craft languages. In languages with more complex syntax, macros have had less success. In part, this has been due to the difficulty in building expressive hygienic macro systems for such languages. JavaScript in particular presents unique challenges for macro systems due to ambiguities in the lexing stage that force the JavaScript lexer and parser to be intertwined. In this paper we present a novel solution to the lexing ambiguity of JavaScript that enables us to cleanly separate the JavaScript lexer and parser by recording enough history during lexing to resolve ambiguities. We give an algorithm for this solution along with a proof that it does in fact correctly resolve ambiguities in the language. Though the algorithm and proof we present is specific to JavaScript, the general technique can be applied to other languages with ambiguous grammars. With lexer and parser separated, we then implement an expressive hygienic macro system for JavaScript called sweet.js.
Starting Page	35
Ending Page	44
Page Count	10
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781450332118
DOI	10.1145/2661088.2661097
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	2014-10-20
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Subject Keyword	Javascript Macros Hygiene
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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