How does Lisp let you redefine the language itself?

Question

I\'ve heard that Lisp lets you redefine the language itself, and I have tried to research it, but there is no clear explanation anywhere. Does anyone have a simple example?<

Answer 1

I'm going to pipe in that Scheme is different from Common Lisp when it comes to defining new syntax. It allows you to define templates using define-syntax which get applied to your source code wherever they are used. They look just like functions, only they run at compile time and transform the AST.

Here's an example of how let can be defined in terms of lambda. The line with let is the pattern to be matched, and the line with lambda is the resulting code template.

(define-syntax let
  (syntax-rules ()
    [(let ([var expr] ...) body1 body2 ...)
     ((lambda (var ...) body1 body2 ...) expr ...)]))

Note that this is NOTHING like textual substitution. You can actually redefine lambda and the above definition for let will still work, because it is using the definition of lambda in the environment where let was defined. Basically, it's powerful like macros but clean like functions.