Is there a `quote`-like facility a la Lisp in Rascal

Question

I know Rascal is intended to be a meta-language for other languages. Do these languages include Rascal itself? Is there any meta-facilities like quote a la Lisp available or planned?

Answer 1

You can transform Rascal using Rascal by including the Rascal syntax definition and simply using the normal quotes. We are not planning to add quoting at run-time for Rascal itself afaik.

One thing that I forgot to mention earlier, is that the "resources" mechanism can be used to manipulate Rascal code at "import" time. You can write any function as in:

@resource{myScheme}
str generateNewCode(str name, loc l) = ...

generateNewCode should generate a Rascal module with name name.

After this you can import as follows:

import MyModule = myScheme://someOtherModuleName;

And then the module that is generated by generateNewCode is imported by Rascal in the module that you typed the import in.

Nothing stops you from writing a generateNewCode function that parses another module, rewrites or extends it and then will be imported.