what is the macro "section"?

Question

Exploring far-out init files, I found this here:

(defmacro section (name &rest a) `(progn ,@a))
(put 'section 'lisp-indent-function 'defun)

then it's used AFAICT as a sort of wrapper, not sure of the genius behind all this. Thought it would be a good thing to know. Can someone explain what it all means?

Answer 1

It enables you to write code like this:

(section testing
  (setq a 1)
  (setq b 2))

(section configuration
  (evil-mode)
  (helm-mode))

This code expands to the following:

(progn
 (setq a 1)
 (setq b 2))

(progn
 (evil-mode)
 (helm-mode))

Normal people would write it like this:

;;; testing
(setq a 1)
(setq b 2)

;;; configuration
(evil-mode)
(helm-mode)

All in all, it's a cute trick. You can find out the above by using the macrostep package and seeing the expansion yourself.