On: Ownership and Borrowing in D

[kbenson]

> Rust procedural macros are like external tools, manipulating the AST as a structure.

Isn't viewing them as like external tools just a C centric view, based on C's (and C++'s) capabilities? Didn't Lisp have macros that manipulated the language as an AST prior to C even existing, inside the language?

[floatboth → kbenson]

Well, Rust is closer to C++ than Lisp :)

If you look at the API https://blog.rust-lang.org/2018/12/21/Procedural-Macros-in-R...

it works on the level of raw tokens, not even the AST. So you have to construct your own AST via the parser if you want to manipulate AST.