Self/Scheme

[Dave at Yost.com]

> > for example, self has some of scheme in it but could use a lot more still:
> > 
> >   - unified blocks and methods (procedures aka closures)
> >   - more convenient representation of code as data
> >   - a macro facility
> 
> I think macros are a really, truly, bad idea.  As the Scheme literature
> shows, it's extremely difficult to implement them in a way that doesn't
> break the language's scoping rules; and they also absolutely require
> climbing one level up the reflective hierarchy of static representations,
> i.e., they require a "data-like" representation of the syntactic elements of
> the language.

Why is it bad to require a "data-like" representation of the syntactic
elements of the language?  This works quite well in lisp, no?

Dave