# Macros

So far, we’ve seen some of the basics of Scheme that are parallel to the concepts we learned with Python. Things like procedures, recursion, etc., are pretty standard across most programming languages. One of the things that not a lot of languages offer, though, is macros.

## Motivation

Consider this: you’re reading some text on a screen, and you want to select all of it and copy it. You could drag your cursor from the start of the text to the end, right click, and hit “Copy,” or you could just press Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C. The keyboard shortcut does the same thing as the first process. In fact, you can imagine that the keyboard shortcut actually performs the first process under the hood.

This is precisely the motivation behind macros – say you’re writing some code to be evaluated twice. In Scheme, you could achieve this as follows:

(begin (print 'woof) (print 'woof))


This code will print the word woof to the console twice, as desired. However, say now that you wanted to replace this code with a much larger process:

(define x 5)
(begin
(if (= x 2) 5 x)
(if (= x 2) 5 x)
)


I wrote the first if procedure and copy-pasted it. Then, I realized that there’s a typo – I meant to check if x is 5, not 2. Now, I need to go back and change two lines of code. Notice also that we’re repeating ourselves here – our first rule in CS 61A is DRY: Don’t Repeat Yourself.

There has to be a way for us to make a procedure do this repetition for us, right?

(define (twice f)
(begin f f)
)

(twice (print 'woof))


Does this work? Not quite. Remember the rules of evaluation for non-special forms: you get the procedure, you evaluate the operands, you apply the procedure to the evaluated operands. This means that (print 'woof) is evaluated before you even call twice, which actually just takes in two undefineds. How do we make Scheme take in a raw command without evaluating it? Macros!

Think about this. Every command is just a chain of characters, right? “(print ‘woof)” is just a string that happens to be a valid Scheme expression. So why can’t we just pass it in as a raw string and tell Scheme to construct a new raw string out of it that can be evaluated? Well, we can!

## Circumventing Rules of Evaluation

(define-macro (twice f)
(begin ,f ,f)
)

(twice (print 'woof))


Let’s walk through this example. The way a macro works is that Scheme actually doesn’t evaluate the operands – it treats them as regular strings. What our macro does is it uses a template to construct a new string that Scheme can evaluate. Here’s what’s going on:

1. We call the twice macro with the string "(print 'woof)".
2. The twice macro has a quoted template (see the quasiquoting review below) that creates the string "(begin <f> <f>)" where <f> is replaced with the string we passed in.
3. The twice macro returns the unevaluated string "(begin (print 'woof) (print 'woof))", which Scheme subsequently evaluates in the same frame from where we called twice.

The way that macros are evaluated in Scheme can be summarized in the following 3 steps:

1. Evaluate the operator to check if a macro of that name exists.
2. Evaluate the body of the macro procedure using unevaluated operands. The macro should not return a result, rather an expression that can be evaluated as Scheme code.
3. Evaluate the expression returned by the macro. Usually, this is the first time any of your operands actually get evaluated. This evaluation occurs in the same frame as where you called the macro – not inside a new frame for the macro.

## Quasiquoting Review

Recall that quoting and quasiquoting are both ways to create strings/lists in Scheme. The difference is that a quoted list is completely raw, while a quasiquoted list is essentially a template: everything that’s unquoted in a quasiquoted list is an element in the template that can be replaced.

'(x 2 3)  ; this is the equivalent of ['x', 2, 3] in Python
(x 2 3)  ; this is the equivalent of ['x', 2, 3] in Python
(,x 2 3) ; this is the equivalent of [x, 2, 3] in Python (note the lack of quotes around x)


For our twice macro, then, you can imagine our template to be something like this in Python:

>>> f = "(print 'woof)"
>>> print_woof_twice = "(begin " + f + " " + f + ")"
>>> print_woof_twice
"(begin (print 'woof) (print 'woof))"


And then we evaluate this as a Scheme expression, because we assume that it’s a valid one :)

## Example: The or Macro

You may recognize this example from discussion, but we’ll look at it anyway. Say we want to create a macro that performs the same way as the or special form, but only for two expressions because variadics are messy.

Without using a macro, the way we would replicate the or form would likely be using the if form: the first operand will always be evaluated, and if it’s truthy, we’ll return the second operand. If not, then we return the third operand. To make this replicate or, the first and second operand will just be our first expression, and the third will be our second expression (only evaluated if the first one is false).

(if (print 'bork) (print 'bork) (/ 1 0))


This will print bork twice, as print returns undefined which is a truthy value in Scheme. Naturally, we’d probably only want to evaluate the expression once, and since we know it’ll be evaluated no matter what (it’s our condition!), we can wrap our if in a let form and set the result of evaluating print to a variable.

(let ((v1 (print 'bork)))
(if v1 v1 (/ 1 0))
)


We evaluate print once, and set v1 to undefined. Then, our if form simplifies to (if undefined undefined (/1 0)). No double evaluation of print! How do we make this code a bit more reusable? Well, (print 'bork) is essentially a placeholder for any first expression, and (/ 1 0) for any second expression. Let’s see if we can write a macro that accounts for this:

(define-macro (or-macro expr1 expr2)
(if ,expr1 ,expr1 ,expr2)
)

(or-macro (print 'bork) (/ 1 0))


This is parallel to our first attempt, where print gets evaluated twice. Now, here’s the tricky part: how do we wrap this in let?

(define-macro (or-macro expr1 expr2)
(let ((v1 ,expr1))
(if v1 v1 ,expr2)
)
)

(or-macro (print 'bork) (/ 1 0))


Notice that we don’t unquote v1! This is because our returned Scheme expression actually defines v1 within itself; unquoting is used to refer to variables that are defined outside of the string we’re working with. In this case though, v1 does not exist outside of the quote. It is defined inside our template, so we don’t need to replace it with anything – we want to keep the variable v1` in our final expression before it’s evaluated!