17 Creating Languages

► |  | The Racket Guide

1 | Welcome to Racket
2 | Racket Essentials
3 | Built-In Datatypes
4 | Expressions and Definitions
5 | Programmer-Defined Datatypes
6 | Modules
7 | Contracts
8 | Input and Output
9 | Regular Expressions
10 | Exceptions and Control
11 | Iterations and Comprehensions
12 | Pattern Matching
13 | Classes and Objects
14 | Units
15 | Reflection and Dynamic Evaluation
16 | Macros
17 | Creating Languages
18 | Concurrency and Synchronization
19 | Performance
20 | Parallelism
21 | Running and Creating Executables
22 | More Libraries
23 | Dialects of Racket and Scheme
24 | Command-Line Tools and Your Editor of Choice
| Bibliography
| Index

▼ | 17 | Creating Languages

17.1 | Module Languages
17.2 | Reader Extensions
17.3 | Defining new #lang Languages

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### 17`` Creating Languages

The macro facilities defined in the preceding chapter let a programmer define syntactic extensions to a language, but a macro is limited in two ways:

- a macro cannot restrict the syntax available in its context or change the meaning of surrounding forms; and

- a macro can extend the syntax of a language only within the parameters of the language’s lexical conventions, such as using parentheses to group the macro name with its subforms and using the core syntax of identifiers, keywords, and literals.

> > > The distinction between the reader and expander layer is introduced in Lists and Racket Syntax.

That is, a macro can only extend a language, and it can do so only at the expander layer. Racket offers additional facilities for defining a starting point of the expander layer, for extending the reader layer, for defining the starting point of the reader layer, and for packaging a reader and expander starting point into a conveniently named language.

17.1 Module Languages
17.1.1 Implicit Form Bindings
17.1.2 Using #lang s-exp
17.2 Reader Extensions
17.2.1 Source Locations
17.2.2 Readtables
17.3 Defining new #lang Languages
17.3.1 Designating a #lang Language
17.3.2 Using #lang reader
17.3.3 Using #lang s-exp syntax/module-reader
17.3.4 Installing a Language
17.3.5 Source-Handling Configuration
17.3.6 Module-Handling Configuration

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