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Message: [QUOTE="User Name, post: 4524437"] What about this? It's still a far cry from lisp macros, as it only lets you define macros that work at the module level, and you need to appropriately quote the input to a macro yourself, but I think with a bit more reworking we could get "macros" to work at whatever level was desired. class Module def defmacro(symbol, &block) methodproc = Proc.new {|*a|self.class_eval(block.call(*a))} self.send(:define_method, symbol, methodproc) end # Example macro that does what was mentioned in the long request: defmacro(:var){|name,init|%Q{ def #{name} @#{name} = #{init.inspect} unless defined? @#{name} @#{name} end def #{name}=(val) @#{name}=val end }} # A silly macro - creates some number of attributes all # with the same prefix, and initial values nil defmacro(:varfamily){|name,n| (1..n).map{|i|"var :#{name}_#{i}"}.join("\n") } end Now let's test this out: irb(main):033:0> class Foo; varfamily :foo,10; end => nil irb(main):034:0> g = Foo.new => #<Foo:0x299b668> irb(main):036:0> g.methods.select{|m|m=~/^foo/}.sort => ["foo_1", "foo_10", "foo_10=", "foo_1=", "foo_2", "foo_2=", "foo_3", "foo_3=", "foo_4", "foo_4=", "foo_5", "foo_5=", "foo_6", "foo_6=", "foo_7","foo_7=", "foo_8", "foo_8=", "foo_9", "foo_9="] irb(main):037:0> g.foo_5 => nil irb(main):038:0> g.foo_5=6 => 6 irb(main):039:0> g.foo_5 => 6 I still think that you're almost always better off using some already present meta-programming tool, but if you really want a string-parsing macro soup, this might do the trick. [/QUOTE]

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