8 References and Acknowledgments

Eli Barzilay’s blog post, Writing ‘syntax-case’ Macros, helped me understand many key details and concepts, and inspired me to use a "bottom-up" approach.

Eli wrote another blog post, Dirty Looking Hygiene, which explains syntax-parameterize. I relied heavily on that, mostly just updating it since his post was written before PLT Scheme was renamed to Racket.

Matthew Flatt’s Composable and Compilable Macros: You Want it When? (PDF) explains how Racket handles compile time vs. run time.

Chapter 8 of The Scheme Programming Language by Kent Dybvig explains syntax-rules and syntax-case.

Fortifying Macros (PDF) is the paper by Ryan Culpepper and Matthias Felleisen introducing syntax-parse.

Shriram Krishnamurthi looked at a very early draft and encouraged me to keep going. Sam Tobin-Hochstadt and Robby Findler also encouraged me. Matthew Flatt showed me how to make a Scribble interaction print syntax as "syntax" rather than as "#'". Jay McCarthy helped me catch some mistakes and confusions. Jon Rafkind provided suggestions. Kieron Hardy reported a font issue and some typos.

Finally, I noticed something strange. After writing much of this, when I returned to some parts of the Racket documentation, I noticed it had improved since I last read it. Of course, it was the same; I’d changed. It’s interesting how much of what we already know is projected between the lines. My point is, the Racket documentation is very good. The Guide provides helpful examples and tutorials. The Reference is very clear and precise.