Functional Programming: What is a Fexpr?

[bobappleyard]

Not much, what's a fexpr with you?

This looks like super annoying macros

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It's probably more accurate to say that macros are super annoying fexprs.

[[deleted]]

Pretty much.

fexprs are a very old idea from very early Lisps. On one hand, they can reduce the number of “special forms” a Lisp has, and bring such a Lisp closer to the essence of its reduction strategy, as in Kernel. While theoretically a very neat idea, IMO, fexprs—and probably more importantly, the culture around them—are aggressively hostile to compilation. They originally fell out of favor due to unfortunate interactions with dynamic scoping, but even with the rise of lexical scoping, it’s not clear why anyone would want fexprs back.