[wg-camlp4] Time for a summary?

[Gabriel Scherer]

There have been very good inputs by Alain, Leo, Hongbo and Jeremy.
I've considered doing a summary as you request (after all, I have a
blog to feed), but Leo promises that he has some more ideas that he
would expose "early this week", so I've mostly been waiting for that.

My opinionated one-paragraph (in fact one-list) take-away would be:
- nobody apparently objects to Alain's idea of using lightweight
quotations and annotations to mimic most existing extensions, and him
and Leo have been busy discussing concrete syntax for that (see
Alain's examples here :
https://github.com/gasche/ocaml-syntax-extension-discussion/wiki/Use-Cases-using-light-annotations
)
- there is an ongoing discussion on the robustness of global rewrites
and possible restrictions (Alain promotes the immediately available,
low-tech social approach, Jeremy has a nice technical suggestion, Leo
is going to write something, and a compromise *is* probably possible
along the lines of encapsulating common local use cases as a strongly
suggested library (like type-conv did for type-derived boilerplate))
- Hongbo has been asking for a discussion on the AST definition at the
core of syntax manipulations, but so far nobody had the courage to
look in details into the polymorphic variant solution of Fan
- relatedly, there is no consensus on the neededness and
implementation of antiquotations; so far we're heading towards a
solution where they are not well supported

Hope that helped.

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 1:43 PM, Yaron Minsky <yminsky at janestreet.com> wrote:
> There have been so many detailed and thoughtful emails that it's hard
> to keep up with the deluge.  I would humbly submit that this would be
> a good time for one of the organizers (Leo or Alain) to put together a
> summary of the different positions that have been expressed about how
> ppx might work, so that one could read over and think through those.
> Right now, I have a hard time keeping the current state of the
> conversation in my head, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.
>
> y
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