A theory of hygienic macros

Authors:
David Herman;Mitchell Wand
Affiliations:
College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA;College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA
Venue:
ESOP'08/ETAPS'08 Proceedings of the Theory and practice of software, 17th European conference on Programming languages and systems
Year:
2008

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Abstract

Hygienic macro systems, such as Scheme's, automatically rename variables to prevent unintentional variable capture--in short, they "just work." Yet hygiene has never been formally presented as a specification rather than an algorithm. According to folklore, the definition of hygienicmacro expansion hinges on the preservation of alpha-equivalence. But the only known notion of alpha-equivalence for programs with macros depends on the results of macro expansion! We break this circularity by introducing explicit binding specifications into the syntax of macro definitions, permitting a definition of alpha-equivalence independent of expansion. We define a semantics for a first-order subset of Scheme-like macros and prove hygiene as a consequence of confluence.