Jatha
Bringing to Java some of the power of Lisp
Introduction
Lisp programmers have a very powerful macro system. When a Lisp programmer writes a macro it's not like a C programmer's macro; it's not just a simple textual substitution. No, when a Lisp programmer writes a macro, she has the full power of Lisp at her disposal.
Lisp macros are Lisp programs that write Lisp programs.
Jatha macros are Java programs that write Java programs.
Jatha is a preprocessor that runs arbitrary java code in order to generate the source code that the compiler sees. Using Jatha, I wrote a simple @PROP macro, that turns this:
class Foo {
@PROP(String, name);
}
Into this:
class Foo {
private String m_name;
public String getName() { return m_name; }
public void setName(String name) { m_name = name; }
}
Jatha "macros" are actually just regular java classes. The @PROP macro is merely a class named "PROP" that lives in the "macros" package. It has a method named expand() that can turn an argument array like {"String", "name"} into the source code for a property with get and set methods.
I have written other simple macros. The @ENUM_OBJ macro turns this one-liner:
@ENUM_OBJ(MyEnumeration, INT, "int", DOUBLE, "double")
Into this sophisticated object-based enumeration:
class MyEnumeration {
public static final MyEnumeration INT = new MyEnumeration("int");
public static final MyEnumeration DOUBLE = new MyEnumeration("double");
public static int getNumElements() {
return 2;
}
public static MyEnumeration getElement(int __index) {
switch (__index) {
case 0: return INT;
case 1: return DOUBLE;
default: return null;
}
}
public static MyEnumeration getElement(String __name) {
if (__name.equals("int")) return INT;
if (__name.equals("double")) return DOUBLE;
return null;
}
private MyEnumeration(String __description) {
this.__description = __description;
}
private String __description;
public String toString() {
return __description;
}
}
You can write macros like these too. Try it. You'll like it.
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