Julia: RFC: make macros bind tighter than commas

[MasonProtter]

Currently, we have that @foo a, b, c parses as @foo((a, b, c)) which seems sensible enough, but it's a major source of frustration when you have a macro inside a function's arguments. As a concrete example, consider a very simple underscore anonymous function macro that would take @_ f(_) + 1 and turn it into x -> f(x) + 1. With the current parsing of macros, if we write

map(@_ f(_) + 1, xs)

this gets parsed as

map(@_((f(_) + 1, xs)))

rather than the desired

map(@_(f(_) + 1), xs)

I'm wondering if anyone has a feeling for how disruptive it would be to change this in 2.0 and if they feel that such a change would be desirable. I'm not sure I've ever seen someone write @foo a, b, c where they didn't intend it to mean (@foo(a), b, c), but this could be a reflection of my ignorance.

Is there some deep and useful reason for the current behaviour that I'm missing?

[MasonProtter]

c.c. @c42f, I remember discussing this with you on Slack, but that conversation is now lost beyond the Slack horizon.

[c42f]

I agree this would be great, thanks for taking the time to capture this into an issue. As far as I'm aware there's no compelling reason for the current parsing, and I haven't personally seen anyone relying on it in the wild.

[mcabbott]

It's a pity that dot(@view A[1:3], B) doesn't just work. Accepting a tuple and an expression @foo (a, b) expr seems useful sometimes, e.g. for @tensoropt. Brackets are not currently required, but I presume they would be, to treat @foo a, b, c differently from @foo (a, b, c). And likewise @foo expr (a, b) differently from @foo expr a, b?

[MasonProtter]

Brackets are not currently required, but I presume they would be, to treat @foo a, b, c differently from @foo (a, b, c). And likewise @foo expr (a, b) differently from @foo expr a, b?

Good points. I think anything that currently is delimited by parens should be unchanged, but I do think @foo expr a, b should become (@foo(expr a), b) rather than @foo(expr, (a, b))

[mbauman]

I'd really like this, too. The place where I'd foresee problems is multi-line DSL macros, since the comma could be seen as a way to split macro args over multiple lines without begin or parens.

julia> :(@foo a,
              b,
              c)
:(#= REPL[2]:1 =# @foo (a, b, c))

julia> :(@foo a
              b
              c)
ERROR: syntax: missing comma or ) in argument list
Stacktrace:
 [1] top-level scope at none:1

[StefanKarpinski]

I suspect this is too breaking to be done in a 1.x release, but I've marked for consideration in 2.0.

[MasonProtter]

Hypothetically, if I or someone else mocked up a PR and we ran PkgEval and showed that it broke no testsuites, would we still consider this too breaking for 1.x just because of the danger to user code?

I can see myself being convinced either way that this either is or isn't acceptable for 1.x even if no testsuites broke.

[StefanKarpinski]

If it passes PkgEval, that's strong evidence that it's not likely to break user code. In that case we'd consider it.