The Dark Tower of Meta-levels ============================================= .. _You want it when: http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/macromod.pdf .. _R6RS document: http://www.r6rs.org/final/html/r6rs/r6rs-Z-H-10.html#node_sec_7.2 I said in the previous episode that even if your implementation of choice does not use explicit phasing, you must understand it in order to write portable programs. Truly understandanding explicit phasing is nontrivial, since you must reason in terms of a (Dark) Tower of import levels, or *meta-levels*. Since the publication of the Aristotle's Metaphysics, the word *meta* has been associated to arcane and difficult matters. The concept of meta-level is no exception to the rule. You can find a full description of the tower of meta-levels in the `R6RS document`_, in a rather dense paragraph in section 7 that will make your head hurt. There is also a celebrated paper by Matthew Flatt, *Composable and Compilable Macros* (a.k.a. `You want it when`_) which predates the R6RS by many years and is more approachable. Its intent is to motivate the module system used by PLT Scheme, which made popular the concept of tower of meta-levels. Meta-levels are just another name for phases. We have already encountered two meta-levels: the run-time phase (meta-level 0) and expand time phase (meta-level 1). However, the full tower of meta-levels is arbitrarily high and extends in two directions, both for positive and for negative integers (!) .. figure:: DarkTower.jpg Aziz faces the Dark Tower of Meta-levels Scheme implementations with explicit phasing allow you to import a module at a generic meta-level ``N`` with the syntax ``(import (for (lib) (meta N)))``, where N is an integer. The forms ``(import (for (lib) run))`` and ``(import (for (lib) expand))`` are just shortcuts for ``(import (for (lib) (meta 0)))`` and ``(import (for (lib) (meta 1)))``, respectively. Instead of discussing much theory, in this episode I will show two concrete examples of macros which require importing variables at a nontrivial meta-level *N*, with *N<0* or *N>1*. For convenience I am keeping all the code of this episode into a package called ``experimental``, which you can download from here: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~micheles/scheme/experimental.zip An easy-looking macro with a deep portability issue ------------------------------------------------------ My first example is a compile time ``name -> value`` mapping, with some introspection: .. code-block:: scheme #!r6rs (library (experimental static-map) (export static-map) (import (rnrs) (sweet-macros)) (def-syntax (static-map (name value) ...) #'(syntax-match ( name ...) (sub (ctx ) #''(name ...)) (sub (ctx name) #'value) ...)) ) This is a kind of second order macro, since it expands to a macro transformer; its usage is obvious in implementations with implicit phasing:: $ cat use-static-map.ss .. code-block:: scheme (import (rnrs) (sweet-macros) (for (experimental static-map) expand)) ;; the for syntax is ignored in implementations with implicit phasing (def-syntax color (static-map (red #\R) (green #\G) (yellow #\Y))) (display "Available colors: ") (display (color )) (display (list (color red) (color green) (color yellow))) (newline) ``color`` is a macro which replaces a symbolic name in the set ``red``, ``green``, ``yellow`` with its character representation (``#\R``, ``#\G``, ``#\Y``) at expand-time (notice that in Scheme characters are different from strings, i.e. the character ``\#R`` is different from the string of length 1 ``"R"``). If you run this script in Ikarus or Ypsilon or Mosh you will get the following unsurprising result:: $ ikarus --r6rs-script use-static-map.ikarus.ss Available colors: (red green yellow)(R G Y) However, in PLT and Larceny, the above will fail. The PLT error message is particularly cryptic:: $ plt-r6rs use-static-map.ss /home/micheles/.plt-scheme/4.0/collects/experimental/static-map.sls:8:25: compile: bad syntax; reference to top-level identifier is not allowed, because no #%top syntax transformer is bound in: quote I was baffled by this error, so I asked for help in the PLT mailing list, and I discovered that there is nothing wrong with the client script and that there is no way to fix the problem by editing it: the problem is in the library code! The problem is hidden, since you can compile the library without issues and you see it only when you use it. Also, the fix is pure dark magic: you need to rewrite the import code in ``(experimental static-map)`` by replacing ``(import (rnrs))`` with ``(import (rnrs) (for (rnrs) (meta -1))`` i.e. the ``static-map`` macro must import the ``(rnrs)`` environment at meta-level -1! Why it is so? and how should I interpret meta-level -1? Negative meta-levels --------------------------------------------------------------------- Matthew Flatt explained to me how meta-levels work. The concept of meta-level is only relevant in macro programming. When you define a macro, the right hand side of the definition can only refer to names which are one meta-level up, i.e. typically at meta-level 1 (expand time). On the other hand, inside a template one goes back one meta-level, and therefore usually a template expands at meta-level 0 (run-time). However, in the case of the ``static-map`` macro, the template is itself a ``syntax-match`` form, and since the templates of this inner ``syntax-match`` expand one level down, we reach meta-level -1. This is why the macro needs to import the ``(rnrs)`` bindings at meta-level -1 and why the error message says that ``quote`` is unknown. The comments below should make clear how meta-levels mix: .. code-block:: scheme (def-syntax static-map ;; meta-level 0 (begin ;; meta-level 1 (syntax-match () (sub (static-map (name value) ...) #'(begin ;; meta-level 0 (syntax-match ( name ...) (sub (ctx ) #''(name ...)) ;; meta-level -1 (sub (ctx name) #'value) ;; meta-level -1 ...)))) Actually ``quote`` is the only needed binding, so it would be enough to import it with the syntax ``(import (for (only (rnrs) quote) (meta -1)))``. If we ignored the introspection feature, i.e. we commented out the line ``(sub (ctx ) #''(name ...))`` there would be no need to import ``quote`` at meta-level -1, and the macro would work without us even suspecting the existence of negative meta-levels. Things are even trickier: if we keep the line ``(sub (ctx ) #''(name ...))`` in the original macro, but we do not use it in client code, the original macro will apparently work, and will break at the first attempt of using the introspection feature, with an error message pointing to the problem in client code, but not in library code :-( Meta-levels greater than one ------------------------------------------------------------ It is clear that the meta-level tower is theoretically unbound in the negative direction, since you can nest macro transformers at any level of depth, and each level decreases the meta-level by one unity; on the other hand, the tower is theoretically unbound even in the positive direction, since a macro can have in its right hand side a macro definition which right hand side will requires bindings defined at an higher level, and so on. In general nested macro definitions *increase* the meta-level; nested macro templates *decrease* the meta-level. Here is an example of a macro which requires importing names at meta-level 2:: $ cat meta2.ss .. code-block:: scheme #!r6rs (import (rnrs) (for (sweet-macros) (meta 0) (meta 1)) (for (only (rnrs) begin lambda display) (meta 2))) (def-syntax m (let () (def-syntax m2 (begin ;; begin, display and (display "at metalevel 2\n") ;; lambda are used here (lambda (x) "expanded-m\n"))) ;; at meta-level 2 (define _ (display "at metalevel 1\n")) ;; meta-level 1 (lambda (x) (m2)))) ;; here (display (m)) Notice that right hand side of a ``def-syntax`` form does not need to be ``syntax-match`` form; the only requirement for it is to be a transformer, i.e. a one-argument procedure. In this example the inner macro ``m2`` has a transformer returning the string ``"m-expanded"`` whereas the outer macro ``m`` has a transformer returning the expansion of ``(m2)`` i.e. again the string ``"m-expanded"``. Running the script will print the following:: $ ikarus --r6rs-script meta2.ss at meta-level 2 at meta-level 1 expanded-m You will get the same in Larceny and in sufficiently recent versions of PLT Scheme (> 4.1.3). Currently Ypsilon raises an exception but this is just a bug (`already fixed in the trunk`_). .. _already fixed in the trunk: http://code.google.com/p/ypsilon/issues/detail?id=98 Discussion ------------------------------------------ The concept of meta-level is tricky. On one hand, there only two physical meta-levels, i.e. the run-time (when the code is executed) and the compile time (when the code is compiled). On the other hand, conceptually there is an arbitrary number of positive meta-levels ("before compile time") and negative meta-levels ("after run-time") which have to be taken in account to compile/execute a program correctly: everytime the compiler look at a nested macro, it has to consider the innermost level first, and the outermost level last. The power (and the complication) of phase specification is that the language used at a given phase can be different from the language used in the other phases. Suppose for instance you are a teacher, and you want to force your students to write their macros using only a functional subset of Scheme. You can do so by importing at compile time all R6RS procedures except the nonfunctional ones (like ``set!``) while importing at run-time the whole of R6RS. You could even perform the opposite, and remove ``set!`` from the run-time, but allowing it at compile time. However, personally I do not feel a need to distinguish the languages at different phases and I like Scheme to be a Lisp-1_ language with a single namespace for all variables. I am also not happy with having to keep manually track of the meta-levels, which is difficult and error prone when writing higher order macros. Moreover, in PLT and Larceny writing a macro which expands to a nested macro with N levels is difficult, since one has to write by hand all the required meta imports. .. figure:: tower_of_babel.jpg Aziz destroys the Tower of Meta-levels All this trouble is missing in Ypsilon and in the implementations based on psyntax. In such systems importing a module imports its public variables for *all* meta-levels. In other words all meta-levels share the same language: the tower of meta-levels is effectively destroyed (one could argue that the tower is still there, implicitly, but the point is that the programmer does not need to think about it explicitly). The model of implicit phasing was proposed by Kent Dybvig and Abdul Aziz Ghuloum, who wrote his `Ph. D. thesis`_ on the subject. .. _Lisp-1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp-1#The_function_namespace .. _Ph. D. thesis: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1291151.1291197&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=34012650&CFTOKEN=38507862