@socks big emi....
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@socks I'm guessing in this context it means something more complicated than how people typically use C preprocessor macros, then?

oh and assembler macros are hard to program without, i don't want to have to remember which memory location we stored this variable in and every location we referenced it in case we have to change it
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@Felthry @socks Elixir is more high-level. Also I think C macros are also dark magic that's hard to test

@noiob @socks when I say how people usually use them I'm talking about things like #define PI 3.14159f
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@Felthry @socks that's what math libraries are for

@Felthry @socks or constants, rather

@noiob @socks I don't see the point in occupying a bit of memory with a constant when you could just use a macro

i imagine compilers probably optimize that out anyway but eh, habit
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@Felthry @noiob This is so funny to me as someone who only does higher level languages. "Occupying a bit of memory with a constant". What the heck

@socks @Felthry yeah I trade efficiency for convenience every day

@socks @Felthry like, using python-style foreach+range instead of a for loop

@socks @noiob if you say `int x = 3`, that's (bar any compiler optimizations) reserving some amount of memory (4 bytes on modern computers) for x to occupy, until it's done being x and can be used for something else (figuring out when it's done being x can be a hard problem if you don't explicitly say it's done being x, this is the cause of many memory leaks). If x is never anything other than 3, it would be more efficient to just use immediate opcodes instead of 1) taking up some memory and 2) requiring additional memory fetches (which are way slower than processor cycles)
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@Felthry @socks I write php, it's gonna run on a beefy machine that's running a hundred web servers in virtual machines so whether I allocate some memory or not is really not going to matter

@noiob @socks we taught ourselves how to program on a TI-84 and now primarily write code for tiny microcontrollers that cost $4, so entirely different worlds here
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@Felthry @noiob That's exactly what I mean by "finding it very funny" eheh

@Felthry @socks still no reason not to use constants

@noiob @socks i think it's probably a habit from when we taught ourselves how to code on a ti-84

ti-basic doesn't have constants
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@Felthry @socks it probably also doesn't have a type checker or memory safety

@noiob @socks it's a calculator, what do you expect?
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@Felthry @socks I expect modern programming languages to be more advanced than BASIC on a calculator

@Felthry @socks constants are resolved at compile time, that's the entire point. Also you get the benefit of type-checking

@Felthry Well yeah, that stuff is handled by language constructs themselves usually. By macros I basically mean code that is autogenerated at compile time

In Elixir they're used all over the place, and they're very convenient but I don't trust user-defined macros. In Haskell you see it in libraries like Persistent for example, where typing out the definition of a database table with Haskell functions is very tedious and you wanna automate it to some extent

@socks ah, so like the GENERATE block in VHDL! yeah we find those annoying to comprehend and debug too
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