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copied!<p>The best explanation of Lisp macros I have ever seen is at</p> <p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NO83wZVT0A" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NO83wZVT0A</a></p> <p>starting at about 55 minutes in. This is a video of a talk given by Peter Seibel, the author of "Practical Common Lisp", which is the best Lisp textbook there is.</p> <p>The motivation for Lisp macros is usually hard to explain, because they really come into their own in situations that are too lengthy to present in a simple tutorial. Peter comes up with a great example; you can grasp it completely, and it makes good, proper use of Lisp macros.</p> <p>You asked: "could you change the functional nature of LISP into a more object oriented syntax and semantics". The answer is yes. In fact, Lisp originally didn't have any object-oriented programming at all, not surprising since Lisp has been around since way before object-oriented programming! But when we first learned about OOP in 1978, we were able to add it to Lisp easily, using, among other things, macros. Eventually the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) was developed, a very powerful object-oriented programming system that fits elegantly into Lisp. The whole thing can be loaded as an extension -- nothing is built-in! It's all done with macros.</p> <p>Lisp has an entirely different feature, called "reader macros", that can be used to extend the surface syntax of the language. Using reader macros, you can make sublanguages that have C-like or Ruby-like syntax. They transform the text into Lisp, internally. These are not used widely by most real Lisp programmers, mainly because it is hard to extend the interactive development environment to understand the new syntax. For example, Emacs indentation commands would be confused by a new syntax. If you're energetic, though, Emacs is extensible too, and you could teach it about your new lexical syntax.</p>

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