C# has an interesting concept of second-class macros called Source Generators: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-c-source-generators/
You can generate additional code at build time, but you can't transform existing expressions (unlike normal macros), so it's more amenable to tooling.
miniblog.
Related Posts
Should lint suppressions be first class syntax or comments?
Adding a proper metadata system (e.g. Clojure or Rust) is a big design space but it's clear which expressions are affected.
Comments are much easier to implement but it's easy for users to get them wrong.
Thoughts?
When a tool supports both regular expressions and literal strings, which should be the default?
If you default to regex, users can match more strings than they realise (e.g. `foo.txt`) or less (e.g. `foo(bar)`).
I typically see regex as the default, but I prefer the opposite.
The lisp model of programming is generally: write a function, evaluate it, interactively call it with some arguments, iterate. Jupyter notebooks are similar.
Why not automatically evaluate definitions (not expressions) whilst working? It seems like it could be a satisfying way to work with code.