Modern Extensible Languages

Extensible languages are programming languages that allow a user to modify or add syntax, and associate the new syntactic forms with semantics. What are these languages good for? What kinds of features are easy to add, and which are not? Are they powerful enough to be taken seriously? In this survey we will attempt to answer such questions as we consider procedural, object-oriented, functional and general-purpose extensible languages. We are primarily interested in expressive power (regular, context-free), associated caveats (unhygienic, ambiguity) and ease of use of the various mechanisms. 1 What is an Extensible Language? Before beginning, it is essential to have an operational definition of what exactly constitutes an extensible language; this will dictate the flow of the remainder of the paper. Standish [23] gives a rather broad definition, stating simply: an extensible language allows users to define new language features. These features may include new notation or operations, new or modifie