I'm here to report that the macros grant is coming along nicely. I've been busier with $dayjob than anticipated, and so the schedule in the grant application is slipping a bit. But I have a fairly good view of the obstacles and to-do items ahead.

When we last saw each other, I was saying that "variable lookups from inside of the quasiquote end up confused". That's still true, and it's the big thing I want to fix before merging my work so far into the master branch, er, into the nom branch.

What I've done since last time:

• I wrote a thorough explanation of why ASTs need to carry around their original lexical environment. (Short explanation: they need to act like closures, but they aren't really so they need to fake it.)

• I re-based the macros branch on the latest nom, and fixed a bunch of regressions in my code that fell out of that.

• I started a test file with macro tests that are more adapted to the work that I'm doing than the tests that are already there. I hope to be able to absorb the ones that are there as we go along; right now they're not much use to me.

Now I'm well poised to go in and actually implement the lexical fixup I need for the ASTs to behave as if they're normal, honest-to-goblin closures. I just thought I'd blog this report in case I end up walking into the source code, never to return. :-)

The trick is this: .SET_BLOCK_OUTER_CTX. It lets you say "block, your OUTER is now this thingy". It's the kind of internal fixup that makes the cat walk by twice inside the Matrix.

Ok, I'm going in. See you on the other side.