Comment by pg314

8 years ago

> Is this a bit like a runtime macro?

You can indeed accomplish some similar things with it.

> Does it have performance disadvantages?

A Common Lisp macro is evaluated once at compile time. In Smalltalk this is evaluated at runtime, so that adds some overhead. Usually you only have to build the AST only once though, and can use the result many times, so that overhead isn't really relevant.