🚀 go-pugleaf

darcy@druid.uucp (D'Arcy J.M. Cain) writes:
>dat@thinkage.on.ca (David Adrien Tanguay) writes:
>>darcy@druid.uucp (D'Arcy J.M. Cain) writes:
>>>Macros can take arguments and defaults can be specified for the arguments.
>>>    @DEFINE foo bar $(1:zap)
>>>    $(foo:goo)    ==>     bar goo
>>Why a separate character '$'? I.e., why not @(foo)?
>
>I hadn't really given it a lot of thought.  I suppose I was copying make
>and shell in this regard.  However, pretending that I have given this some
>thought, the answer is so that a macro used at the start of a line doesn't
>get confused with a preprocessor directive.  Do you have a strong reason
>why not a separate character?

Not really, just one less character to have to escape, one less variant
international glyph to worry about. C may not use $, but other texts may.
I infer from your reason that the '(' after the '$' is optional (in some
contexts): i.e., $foo will expand the foo macro. I had thought otherwise.
-- 
David Tanguay       dat@Thinkage.on.ca  dat@Thinkage.com  uunet!thinkage!dat
Thinkage, Ltd.           Kitchener, Ontario, Canada          [43.40N 80.47W]